Disnarration: The Unsaid Matters

Disnarration: The Unsaid Matters is the outcome of a conference on the theme of disnarration, narrative refusals, counterfactual histories, held at IIT Bombay, Mumbai. Since the time it was first introduced by Gerald Prince, the concept of disnarration has brought a new perspective of looking at narrative and theorising about it. Disnarration, in principle, can be applied as an interpretive tool to almost all narrative texts to see how far they yield to its investigative strategies. At the same time, disnarration also signposts discourses such as postcolonialism and feminism, because of the way it foregrounds silencing, and thus extends beyond being merely a tool for reading narrative structures. The first section of this book looks at the notion of disnarration itself as a theoretical principle and examines its possibilities and trajectory. In the second section, it addresses subjects like postcoloniality, gender, physical disability and ethnicity and examines how chosen texts have disnarrated it. Disnarration: The Unsaid Matters thus approaches the idea of disnarration from two ends: the specific text and the larger, broader, theoretical reach. The editor’s introduction effects a dialogue between these two vantage-points of deliberating disnarration.

Contents: Introduction/Sudha Shastri. Section 1: Preview: 1. The rhetoric of choice/Supriya Chaudhuri. 2. Erasures, silences and recodings: the writer in search of meaning/Jasbir Jain. Section 2: Texts: 3. ‘All things done unto edifying’: Anne Dowriche and the play of history/Debapriya Basu. 4. Politics of representing gender violence Jyotirmoyee Devi’s the river churning: Paulomi Chakraborty. 5. ‘The question is the story itself’: multiplicity of disnarration in Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy/Shinjini Chattopadhyay. 6. The politics of disnarration: nation and narrative in the storyteller/Sreya Dutt. 7. Historical fiction, disnarrated and the communal stratagem: questioning the counterfactual constructions of history in Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Anandamath and Kanaiyalal Maneklal Munshi’s Jay Somanatha/Rohit Dutta Roy. 8. His story, her story and history: competing stories in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks/David Jeyaraj Franklin. 9. Tricksters, rebels and wandering narratives in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water/Anushka Sen. 10. Disnarration and disability: exploring narrative and corporeal logics/Vinita Singh. 11. Do these ruins narrate our pasts? an examination of W.G. Sebald’s narratives/Krishnan Unni. P. 12. Marketing democracy to a dictatorship: Pablo Larraín’s no and the pragmatics of national narratives/Nisha Viswanathan.