Is there no basis for differentiating a personal from a historical narrative? My narrative is a mess, so I'd like to get to grips with the question, ideally as it links to literature. Who in philosophy or literary criticism is explicitly arguing against the claim that all we have are lots of narratives of individual people, perhaps due to post-modern ends to "meta" narratives?
So Rorty thinks "of the entire culture, from physics to poetry, as a single, continuous, seamless activity in which the divisions are merely institutional and pedagogical". I'm asking for clearly worded refutations of the atomized, to the person, version of that. That our entire culture can only be understood as the actions of individual lives, and not at any more grand level than that.
So instead of being able to map the beginnings of literary modernism and how community may or may not have sustained that beyond its initial impetus to coexist with post-modernism, really only that some contemporary writer is writing with some techniques to the critical success that they now enjoy.