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 editors introduction effects a dialogue between these two vantage-points of deliberating disnarration.