Of course, in the meetings I've attended over the years, anonymity has always been a kind of collective fiction.
For him it offered no answers or resolutions; it was an authorless collective fiction too vast and relentless to generalise about.
Currencies, be they fiat, gold, or fixed-supply, are a collective fiction: they only have value if a critical mass of people believe they do.
While a plainsman likes "to appear as a solitary inhabitant of a region that only he could explain," a nation of one, the plainsmen's constant debates about art, ornament, architecture, and archive, their rivalries and sports, their concern with differentiating themselves from Outer Australia, betray an obsession with constructing and contesting collective fictions.
Fiction Collective Two/Florida State University, paper, $13.95.
Among his other novels are "Take It or Leave It: An Exaggerated Second-Hand Tale to Be Read Aloud Either Standing or Sitting" (Fiction Collective, 1976); "The Twofold Vibration" (Indiana University, 1982); and "Smiles on Washington Square: A Love Story of Sorts" (Thunder's Mouth, 1985), which received an American Book Award in 1986.
For almost 40 years now, the publishing group known as Fiction Collective has been a vital wild limb of new American literature.
"Great weight" was attached to the protection of collective responsibility, the polite fiction that all ministers agree with every government line.
The collective puts out as much non-fiction as fiction, with their radical political blog Giap, which started in 2000, among the most-visited sites in Italy.
On the other hand, fiction becomes more fictional — multiple writers (the author and his censors) are making up a collective story as they go along, improvising, cutting, editing, bargaining with each other.
It's wonderful that we, the people, as a collective, can generate such complex fictions.
