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The Storyteller : Competing narratives, meaning in 'disnarration


Sreya Dutt Bio-note: Sreya Dutt is presently a Guest Lecturer in English at Jogamaya Devi College, Kolkata. She had also worked as a research fellow in the Oral Narratives Project, a UGC sponsored project under Jadavpur University. She completed her M.Phil from the Department of Comparative Literature and M.A. at the Department of English, both at Jadavpur University. Abstract: Mario Vargas Llosa's novel The Storyteller may be studied in the light of competing narrative logic. One the one hand is the refusal of the storyteller, or the hablador, (Braz Cubas) to tell his story, and the ensuing complicity between the storyteller and the Machiguenga indigenous community which is geared towards protecting his identity. The community refuses to disclose their way of life and secret rituals and ceremonies, all of which are intrinsically linked with the figure of the hablador to a group of documentary-makers who seek to film their 'modernisation' and 'integration' in nationalist Peruvian discourse. Attempts at intervention to unlock the 'secrets' and 'mysteries' of this indigenous community and their hablador by social scientists meet with dire and startling consequences that again defy rational, empirical explanations. The community thus functions on the principle of narrative closure, refusing to be rendered 'tellable' by eschewing the availability of its narrative to social scientists, documentary makers and the like. The other narrative impetus in the novel is informed by the figure of the narrator and the author Mario Vargas Llosa himself, who attempts to fashion the story of the Machiguenga community and the hablador through an impassioned life-long pursuit , albeit in a non-intrusive manner, by studying extensively the accounts

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of missionaries and the work of social scientists. Vargas Llosa's desire to iterate and imagine consciously the figure of a reclusive and elusive storyteller in a society removed from modern, rational paradigms maybe read in terms of the novel's reflexivity with respect to the process of narrator and narration, as well as the contingencies that govern the production or iteration of narrative itself. This deep fascination surrounding the figure of the hablador in Machiguenga society, which is portrayed to be a forbidden and illicit craving, is expressed in terms of 'the road not taken' the attempt to read disnarration and refusal to narrate. This counter-narrative, that cannot be 'captured' from an obscure indigenous community may also be read in terms of rendering them 'tellable' in perhaps the most subjective mode possible, iterated with deep affect. Through this novel and its strategies of narration are revealed possible ways of understanding the subaltern as opposed to the deliberate, coercive and doctored approach of integrating such communities in the modern nation-state, interrogating subtly dominant nationalist narrative itself. 2 Tricksters, Rebels and Wandering Narratives in Green Grass, Running Water Anushka Sen Bio-note: Anushka Sen is an M.A. 1st year student at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Her literary interests include metaphysical and modern poetry, Shakespeare, and a whole array of authors from the Modernist period and beyond. She hopes to specialize in the field where postmodern and postcolonial elements intersect, and where she can give equal importance to socio-historical context, narrative theory as well as affect. This is the first time she is presenting a paper at an official conference.

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Abstract: Narrative itself is, by default, of crucial importance to metafiction. Where the act of utterance receives special attention, what is left unsaid through denial, retraction or omission also emerges as a significant aspect of the speaker's choice. In the case of Thomas King's Green's Green Grass, Running Water, what is touched upon only to be left out of the narrative is not just subtly suggested but made explicit through a variety of techniques. From very early on in the text, possibilities of uninterrupted, linear storytelling are constantly thwarted as the storyteller is prompted to revise his beginnings and make other verifications even at later junctures. My paper wishes to explore the tenor of confusion, playfulness and circularity which is created by these rambling recursions, and forms a large part of this novel's narrative atmosphere. Also part of this discussion will be the larger narrative structure, where the accounts of four 'Indian' figures appear to be filtered through the communications of an overarching first-person narrator*, to his listener Coyote. Regular third person narrative is interspersed with dialogue at the levels of the narrated and the process of narration. Recurrent references to syncretic and amorphous Creation Myths add their independent flavour to the novel's content. The time frames further complicate this setup, as the I-narrator and Coyote initially appear to be outside the spatio-temporal sphere of action, exchanging thoughts on incidents that seem to have passed, and yet talking with the immediacy of live spectators. They are imbued with a metaphysical potency and an eternal quality. Yet at some point they appear naturally upon the contemporary scene, which Coyote actually influences by starting a chain of decisive events. King does not go all out to create an alternative history, such as Coetzee does in

Foe, but by actively engaging with the mythic, and spanning an astounding
range of structural, discursive and cultural elements, he certainly complicates and undercuts what we have come to understand as the grand narrative of

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history in dominant discourse. The abandoned or chaotic narrative strands discussed above do not point to anything specific except what they already display- multiplicity, retelling, reminiscence, interlinking; I would argue that one needs only to see these attributes through the lens of narrative theory and socio-cultural tropes to understand that their very existence takes a subversive stance without suggesting and rejecting any particular generic tendency. Nevertheless, my paper also seeks to discuss how as a result, certain recognizable stereotypes are turned on their head- Christian theology, the Western film genre, the exotic Indian to name a few. Thomas King makes use of the fabular, the archetypal, and of concrete social tensions. He utilizes indigenous material (especially the amoral yet instructive trickster figure) and Anglo-American cultural inputs to bring out a balance of legitimacy and absurdity in the white hegemonic as well as marginalized native American traditions. I would like to point out that this duality also ties up with the unexpected resonances of Western Postmodern techniques to be found in so called 'primitive' oral narrative culture. Yet it must be noted that King, part Greek and part Cherokee, eventually and clearly takes the moral side of the indigenous people; not by homogenizing them in a positive light, but by holding onto one side of their culture as most valuable- that which stands against the self-seeking and seductive White Capitalist trends which almost inevitably induce hypocrisy and divisiveness in society. Therefore both fluidity (such as the Coyote's) and rigidity (as displayed in the resistance put up by Eli Standalone) are celebrated for being a successful counter to the destructive forms they take on when incorporated in a Western socio-economic structure. *Here, referred to subsequently as the 'I-narrator'.

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3 His Story, Her Story and History: Competing Stories in Louise Erdrichs Tracks David Jeyaraj Franklin T Bio-note: David Jeyaraj Franklin is currently an Assistant Professor of English at the Gandhigram Rural Institute Deemed University, Gandhigram, Tamil Nadu. He teaches courses on English language and literature to graduate and postgraduate students at Gandhigram. His teaching career is now 8 years old. He has presented papers and published articles on Theory, Ecocriticism, and Native Literatures. He is currently at the early stages of his doctoral research which he plans to do on a big list of native writers from around the world and that list includes Sally Morgan, Louise Erdrich, Kocharethi Narayan, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Jose Maria Arguedas, and Bernardo Atxaga. He loves indiscriminate reading and following cricket and Formula 1. He lives in Madurai with his wife (who teaches English at a college, as well) and two daughters. Abstract: If Gerard Princes statement one narrators unnarratable can very well be anothers narratable just as what is impossible in one context may be de rigueur in another one can be taken as the license to say or not to say and by extension, to decide how to say, then Louise Erdrichs novel Tracks makes a classic case for itself as a multi-narrative per se. This award-winning novel by the Native American Erdrich has two opposing yet alternating linear narrators, Nanapush and Pauline, who through their completely different narrations of a same sequence of events, present an interesting study. The novel tracks the lives of a small community of Chippewas who are torn between native land and quick cash; tradition and modernity; continuity and change and the like. The dual/duel narrators present the stories in contrast to represent this duality. While the trickster Nanapush presents the story as it really happened, reading

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between the lines (literally), the more modern Pauline presents the story she thought had really happened. The former narrates what should not have happened and the latter what should have happened. More importantly, Erdrich spins the story around real life incidents of the early decades of the 20th century, bringing in the history of the indigenous communities struggles to survival in the brave new world. The proposed paper will attempt to study the competing stories in this narrative and try to bring out the disnarrated, unnarrated, and the non-narrated. The paper would focus on the narrative strategy employed by Erdrich and highlight the technical prowess of this writer as regards to narratology. 4 Eluding Interpretation and Appropriation: Silence in Black Girl/White Girl Srirupa Chatterjee Bio-note: Srirupa Chatterjee is Assistant Professor in English in the Department of Liberal Arts at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, India. Her research and teaching interests include Contemporary American Fiction, Literary and Critical Theories and Academic Composition. Srirupa has published in journals like The

Explicator, Notes on Contemporary Literature among others. She also has


publications in a number of literary anthologies and has presented research papers at various national and international conferences. Abstract: Joyce Carol Oatess Black Girl/ White Girl (2006) is a powerful exploration into issues of racism and beauty myth in the American 70s depicted through the eponymous black girl, Minette Swift. Bright and arrogant, Minette is a student at the elitist Schuyler College in post-Vietnam war America and is victimized not only for being black but also for being unattractive and unfeminine.

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Presented as a memoir by her college roommate, the white girl (Genna HewettMeade), the novel recollects the tragic circumstances that led to Minettes death for which Genna feels partly responsible. While on the one hand the novel can be read as a polemic against the double jeopardy suffered by African American women resulting not only from racism but also from discriminations based on western parameters of beauty and femininity, on the other hand, surprisingly, Minettes own responses to the humiliations and discriminations she faces are rarely articulated in the narrative. Notably, even as Minette is shown to be fiercely assertive and rebellious, it is Genna who recounts her life as the latter decides to write a novel about her deceased friend out of white guilt fifteen years after the incident. In the novel Minettes personal experiences are, therefore, in many ways what Gerald Prince describes as the disnarrated and in turn give rise to a number of questions, such as: How did Minette perceive her circumstances? Did they appear funny, cruel, pathetic or tragic to her? Why do we get to know of her through her white friend instead of perhaps her own diary/journal entries? And finally, by largely silencing Minette is Oates empowering or disempowering her literary protagonist? By keeping in mind Oatess characteristic literary and political iconoclasm, the present paper attempts to explore the probable explanations for the narrative complexity in

Black Girl/ White Girl.


5 Addressing Racial Tellability in Colson Whiteheads The Intuitionist Jaya Shrivastava Bio-note: Jaya Shrivastava is a Ph.D. Student in English at Indian Institute of Technology Indore. She obtained her M.Phil degree in Linguistics from The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad with a dissertation on Stylistics. Her research interests are in Cognitive Poetics and Post Black Fiction. Her doctoral

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research focuses on the study of perspective development in the novels of Colson Whitehead by taking a cognitive approach to analyze his narrative techniques. Abstract: The objective of this paper is to study the modes of disnarration employed by Colson Whitehead in his novel, *The Intuitionist* (1999), to address racial tellability. Disnarration, as defined by Gerald Prince, is a narrative device used to narrate events that do not happen though they could have. The plot of *The Intuitionist *is driven by an elevator accident which seemed impossible enough to never have actually happened. The two rival groups, the Intuitionists and the Empiricists fighting a political battle to win a coming election in the Department of Elevator Inspectors, accuse each other of sabotage. But the protagonist of the novel, Lila Mae Watson, discovers that the accident was not a consequence of a conspiracy but was simply a catastrophic breakdown. Characters refuse to narrativise the accident as catastrophic, and treat it to their own advantage belying the notion of a technological flaw in the elevator. This paper using Marie-Laure Ryans concept of embedded narratives and tellability attempts to show that disnarration and narrative refusal foreshadows the racial logic functioning in the novel. Ryan shows that plot is not merely driven by action but also by the characters tendency to serialize speculative positions. The use of Ryans concept as a methodological basis for this paper also brings out the significance of counterfactual rhetoric in peoples mental lives. The accident opens up a plethora of possible situations encouraging the characters to act on their false beliefs. The readers gaze is forcefully diverted from the accident to the novels presumption of a color line when the embedded narrative points out that Lila Maes racial identity as a Colored woman is the cause of her involvement in the mystery behind the accident. The paper will attempt to use such a shift in

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perspective to show how the novel disnarrates the generic characteristics of a detective novel while simultaneously highlighting its racial tellability. 6 Politics/ Poetics of Disnarration and Narrative Refusals in Contemporary Indian English Womens Fiction of Sexual Transgressions Payal Jain Bio-note: Payal Jain works in the Department of English, Dibrugarh University, Dibrugarh Assam. Her areas of interest are: women's literature; Indian English Literature and fiction studies. She has worked on the representation of body and sexuality in contemporary India English women fiction for her doctoral thesis. Abstract: Disnarration, as defined by Gerald Prince, refers to those elements in a narrative which explicitly consider and refer to what does not take place, but could have taken place. Such narrative refusals can serve several important functions by slowing down the pace of the narrative; intensifying a theme; providing density to the characters; enhancing the element suspense and so on. In addition to these rhetorical functions, such refusals play ideological role as well. The disnarrated underlines the unsuitability of a particular happening within the narrative as well as its implied narratees cultural context. Of the several options available, the choice of the narrated discourse is always a political one, however, by giving space to the disnarrated, the narrator always underline the possibility of an alternative story. This paper reads the instances of disnarration in contemporary Indian English womens fiction with reference to the interplay of sexual politics and narrative poetics. Taking instances from the much-in-vogue narratives of female protagonists sexual transgressions like The Thousand Faces of Night, Mistress

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and Shakuntala, this paper focuses on the examples of disnarration that occur just before the act of sexual transgression and the resultant narrative closure. The instances of disnarration on the first occasion invariably underscore the protagonists resistance to the patriarchal sexual norms. However, the later ones somehow tame the force of sexual transgression. Whereas the possibility of liberated and fulfilling life for the protagonists faulting sexual and matrimonial norms are there, within the narrative world, it mainly remains an unfulfilled dream the disnarrated. The paper seeks to argue that despite more or less conventional narrative closure, the under-erasure disnarrated keeps haunting the narrative as well as the readers and can be said to play noteworthy feminist subversive role. 7 Politics of Representing Gender Violence: Jyotirmoyee Devis The River Churning:

A Partition Novel
Paulomi Chakraborty Bio-note: Paulomi Chakraborty is Assistant Professor of English at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences in IIT Bombay. Her research interests are in Partition of 1947, the turbulent 40s in Bengal, and broader debates of gender and political collectives. Abstract: In Jyotirmoyee Devis The River Churning: A Partition Novel (original in Bengali,

Epar Ganga, Opar Ganga; 1967), we find a strategic instance of disnarration. The
protagonist of the novel, Sutara, is assaulted during the upheaval of the Partition, but the novel does not specify the exact nature of the violence that is inflicted on her. It is possible that Sutara is raped, but we do not know this for sure. What the nature of the physical assault that Sutara suffers is not only not revealed to the

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other characters and the readers, but it is not available to Sutara herself. I propose to analyse this silence as the novels attempt to problematize a normative rape narrative and expose the patriarchal codes of representation that underwrite such narratives. The novels refusal to give that detail of Sutaras assault, I will argue, is a comment on and critique of the social Brahminical norms in treating soiled (raped or feared rape) women. The question of whether Sutara is actually raped or not is a cognitive cul-de-sac for her society (and us), because of the profound irony that the facticity of her rape is of little consequence. Brahmin households reject her as in that worldview rape is not a male violence on a female body but a possible violation of sexual chastity of a caste-Hindu female body. Sutara, the refugee woman in the new India, is always-already a rape victim because she has got caught in a Partition riot and, to make matters worse, has been rescued and given shelter by Muslims. In this regard, the truth of the rape is irrelevant. What is under critique in The River Churning is this irrelevance such that a woman is to be punished for her very vulnerability to rape. 8 Disnarration and Disability: Exploring Narrative and Corporeal Logics Vinita Singh Bio-note: Vinita Singh is an M.Phil scholar from Department of English, University of Delhi. Her dissertation focuses on the sexual politics of the disabled body in Modern India. One of her articles The Mutilated, Wounded and Rejected Women: The Disabled Female Body in the Partition Narratives from India is going to be published in an international journal. Recently she presented a paper Romancing the Disabled Body at the international conference at St. Stephens, DU.

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Abstract: The liberal humanist perspective about a direct and neat narrative logic in a text has been so much abused and critiqued by scholars that there has been a severe attention to understand the contribution of the illogical in/to a narrative in contemporary times. The negotiation of narrative logic by the principle of disnarration is both complex and crucial to explore. Disnarration has been defined by Gerald Prince primarily as a literary device where the narrator/author withholds the consequences that might have been possible

and are equally logical which punctures the readers obvious speculations about
the course of a narrative. Disnarration is, most certainly, etymologically nonequivalent to what is meant by illogical, nonetheless, the exploration of multiple logics that are equally potent is central to it. A reader of the disnarrated either accepts the authors logic practising Keatsian willing suspension of disbelief or s/he refutes the authors reason as only one among several possible outcomes and imagines several. This paper tries to explore the resistive potential implied by disnarration as a structural dismemberment of any unified narrative. The inclusion of the unwritten yet potentially possible into the written insists going beyond the whole idea of a bound narrative an extension of the Derridean text. Using the notion of the textual and whole body of a narrative and the disfiguration of this body brought by disnarration, the paper tries to discuss the relevance of disnarration to study the experiences and logic of the disabled human body as depicted in South Asian Cinema. The paper discusses the use of disnarration in the representation of disability in the films to explore the problems and possibilities of bringing disnarration as a structural principle and disability as a bodily reality in a dialectic relationship within a cinematic narrative. The paper is drawn by the impetus to tap the possibilities of using disnarration as a strategy to speculate multiple logics for a text in order to understand disability that defies the presumed logic of the normative body. Using the refusal of narrative closure that disnarration implies, these films

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problematize what we understand by corporeal logic of a normative human body. These films strong suggestion to the role of the audiences imagination stresses looking at corporeal difference not in terms of lack but as one among

several possible and yet potent selfhoods. Using Rosemarie Garland Thompsons
idea about the temporary-abled body, this paper will try to explore the author-

willed narrative closures as temporary. The paper draws on film theory, readerresponse theory and narrative theory to build its argument. 9 The Break-up and Reconstitution of China in Late Victorian and Edwardian Narratives Ross G. Forman Bio-note: Ross G. Forman is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Formerly, he taught at the National University of Singapore. His book China and the Victorian

Imagination is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.


Abstract: This paper investigates manifestations of the counterfactual in British narratives about China dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. On the cusp of and following the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, the notion that a breakup and subsequent carve-up of China was imminent infected Anglophone writers of history and fiction with a sense of possibility. Depending on the writers location (in the metropole or in Hong Kong, Shanghai or one of the treaty ports) and their stance on imperial expansion, these narratives described different utopian or dystopian futures for Chinas relationship to Britain. Their imagined futures range from the London-Kowloon monorail closely linking the Britain and China as envisaged by Betty in Intercepted Letters (1905)a

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work published locally by a Hong Kong newspaperto the apocalyptic scenarios of invasion novels written by M.P. Shiel, William Carlton Dawe, and others. With some of these works perceiving China as a potential rejuvenator of British imperialism and others positing it as a threat, these narratives raise significant questions about popular literatures relationship to imperial policymaking. They expose distinctions between the sense by writers on the ground in China that Britains hegemony over other foreign powers was tenuous and metropolitan authors with more jingoistic outlooks. Both sets of narratives also shift the frontier of the Great Game further East, especially after the Boxer Rebellion and in the lead-up to the Russo-Japanese War, as is the case in Julian Croskeys The S.G. (1900). They also constitute their stories trajectories around what cannot be narrated but is everywhere suggested: the possibility that the Chinese could join the ranks of civilized nations, as many considered Japan to be doing at this time. Instead, the invasion novels conjure up foreign-educated, hybrid figures like Shiels protagonist Dr. Yen How in The Yellow Danger (1898), who embody Western knowledge and Eastern cunning and barbarism. Meanwhile, literature by China-based writers like Betty discount the Chinese by propagating a notion of foreign China that sutures over the presence of Chinese subjects under British jurisdiction and ignores the existence of an English-speaking elite in such places as Singapore and Penang. The paper also discusses how these works configure Indian independence, something which, in a number of the invasion novels, the Chinese leaders promise Indian elites but refuse to deliverin an interesting precursor to Japanese support for Subhas Chandra Boses Indian National Army during the Second World War.

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10 Rescues and Refusals: Emin Pasha in Africa Kirk Arden Hoppe Bio-note: Kirk Arden Hoppe is an Associate Professor of African and World History at the University of Illinois in Chicago. He is interested in the intersections of cultural and environmental histories. His first monograph, Lords of the Fly, examined the colonial imagining and engineering of environments in East Africa. His current project looks at hybredic European, Ottoman and African imperial identities and spaces through a cultural biography of a German Ottoman official Emin Pasha. Abstract: In this paper, I interrogate the contradictory stories told by and about a secondtier German-Ottoman colonial agent, Edward Schnitzer more widely known as Emin Pasha. I explore counterfactual stories of Emin Pasha and the textual production of celebrity by way of competing narrationsbut more importantly, disnarrationsof European colonialism in Africa. A German trained medical doctor, Schnitzer worked for the Ottoman state as the governor of Equatania in the Southern Sudan from 1878-1888, to highly romanticized fame in Europe as a white man cut off from civilization by the Islamic Mahdist rebellion. Through his own letters (some published posthumously) Schnitzer worked to produce and control his own Victorian celebrity as a male European scientist-explorer. In contrast to the hypermasculine narratives of Henry Stanley, Schnitzers self-narration depict a slight gentle figure collecting biological specimens and quietly administering over a voluntary community of Egyptian and Sudanese soldiers and their families who hold him in fond regard. But his story was over-ridden by stories told in the

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media and in the vast publishing industry of memoires by other European male adventures. In 1888, Henry Stanley lead a famous expedition to rescue Schnitzer whom Stanley and others insisted was a captive of African forces. In his writings, Stanley produced a consecutivized double narrative, the first emphasizing his and Schnitzers masculine prowess and the imagined white brotherhood that stretched between them. The second served to hyper-masculinize Stanley and feminize Schnitzer by emphasizing his need of rescue. This story of the relief expedition, as recounted by numerous members of Stanleys expedition, is destabilized when it is Schnitzer who rescues the starving remnants of Stanleys troops, and then equivocates about whether or not to leave the Southern Sudan with Stanley citing his own content with his life in Africa. There are revealing tensions in these competing narratives of which there are at least three: the popular insistence then and since that Schnitzer was a renowned European explorer of Africa displaying the remote masculinity of anti-conquest as discussed by Pratt (Imperial Eyes, 1992); Stanleys attempt to redouble his own white, colonialist masculinity by rescuing a fellow imperial adventurer; and Schnitzers own counter-narrativesnarratives that are refused by his imperial readershipthat picture him as a slight, mild-mannered, bespectacled, and problematically Arabized self-exiled scientist, one whose sexuality is in question due to his suspiciously intimate relations with African leaders and subaltern soldiers.

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11 Historical Fiction, Disnarrated and the Communal stratagem: Questioning the Counterfactual constructions of History in Bankim Chandra Chatterjees

Anandamath and Kanaiyalal Maneklal Munshis Jay Somnath


Rohit Dutta Roy Bio-note: Rohit Dutta Roy is a final year MA student in the Department of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University, India. He is presently serving on the editorial team of Inquire: Journal of Comparative Literature. He has presented his scholarly work at Jawaharlal Nehru University, University of Delhi, Banaras Hindu University, Aligarh Muslim University, Visva-Bharati University, Central University of Rajasthan, Brown University, Duke University, University of Cambridge and Columbia University. He is also engaged in translating Bengali plays of Girish Chandra Ghosh, Bijon Bhattacharya and Utpal Dutt. Abstract: The disnarrated as delineated by Prince comprises of elements in a narrative text referring to events which do not happen in the represented world and in this paper I would try to deconstruct the act of chronicling and conferring meaning through disnarration in Bankim Chandra Chatterjees Anandamath and Kanaiyalal Maneklal Munshis Jay Somnath. I would analyze the depiction of purely imagined and desired worlds within the textual plane arising out of unwarranted beliefs and a revivalist ideology. I shall approach the disnarrated in Jay Somnath and Anandamath as the consequence of the schematic process apparent in the logic of the fabulas action. How does Bankims religio-political stance inform the mythmaking potential of Anandamath? How did the reworking of a historical event in Jay Somnath help to reassert Munshis own theory of the continued destruction of the temple from the early centuries AD onwards? I would try to show how Bankims deliberate distortion of history in

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Anandamath with the Hindu Santans and the British reconciled towards the
formers quest for a mythic motherland was in line with his lifelong engagement with the disnarrated. I would also discuss Munshis communal moorings having guided authorial intent. From Munshis concern with racial purity and the need to project a constant distance between Hindus and Muslims throughout history, to the resurgent Hindus and the contemptuous portrayal of the Muslims in Anandamath, such narratives have gained prominence amongst the communalists due to the design of the fictional world which the reader cannot revoke. I shall try to show how the vindication of Hindu pride in Jay

Somnath or the idea of a Hindu India contained in Anandamath posit the latent
power of the disnarrated to move religious passion. I shall also try to show through these texts how events can be disnarrated, with the underscored tellability linking it with other fictional reconstructions in the face of a religiocommunal nationalist upsurge. 12 All things done unto edifying: Anne Dowriche and the Play of History Debapriya Basu Bio-note: Debapriya Basu has done her graduation and post-graduation in English from Jadavpur University. She received her PhD degree in December 2012. Her work was on women poets of the English Renaissance (funded by the UGC-JRF scheme and the Inlaks Research Travel Grant 2011). She is currently working as Junior Research Fellow in the UGC University with Potential for Excellence-Phase II Social Science and Cultural Resources Project under the Jadavpur University School of Cultural Texts and Records since October 2012.

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Abstract: Anne Dowriches The French History, a sixteenth-century English verse narrative, defines itself as a reformist text, ostensibly taking its place among the Protestant activist-writing of its time. It seeks to narrate in a few hundred lines the long period of struggle and suffering that marked the French religious wars through the lens of partisan politics. It flirts with danger in doing so: as Walter Raleigh noted, a teller of recent controversial history was likely to be struck in the teeth for her efforts at following truth too near the heels. It aims to improve the quality of current verse-production in England. By telling a violent story set on foreign shores in dramatic verse, it seeks to warn Elizabeth I to take heed and beware of future political crisis. It is, also, written by a woman. Although this text, like any other, contains moments of disnarration in the sense of events that could have happened, I am more interested in the aspect of disnarration which is reflected in choices not taken and possibilities not actualised. Stressing this position, my paper will seek to establish that there is a narrative refusal in Dowriches work to conform to Protestant activism. The text is not contained by the Protestant agenda that it vociferously endorses. Through conscious authorial choice that a careful reading of the text makes clear, the poem seems to deny a lot of its premises at various points of time. Thus, if the narrative expectation is towards a Protestant polemics, in reality the poem ends up by moving towards a comment on religious war overall, denying the generic expectations that it generates. This essay will try to explicate how, contrary to the connotation of the phrase used in the title, Anne Dowriches play with her narrative choices reveal a much more complex agenda than the one that she appears to want her story to imply.

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13 The Question is the Story Itself: Multiplicity of Disnarration in Paul Austers

The New York Trilogy


Shinjini Chattopadhyay Bio-note: Shinjini Chattopadhyay is a first year Masters student at Jadavpur University, Department of English. She has previously presented papers at the 2013 AAALS Annual conference at Georgetown University, where she won the Wertheim Prize for best graduate student paper; at the 2012 International Conference of the Centre for Studies in Romantic Literature at Presidency University and at several seminars held in her own department. Abstract: According to Gerald Prince Narrative operates essentially in a realm of certainty and knowledge. But the process of disnarration disrupts this sense of assurance and points towards one or more possible alternatives. In Paul Austers The New

York Trilogy (1987), comprising three novellas- The City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room(1986), the actual narrative (if there is any
to begin with) is buried under a labyrinth of disnarratives. In the trilogy, the instrument of disnarration works at a fictional as well as a metafictional level. In case of the latter, the relation among the author, the narrator, the subject of narration and the reader is problematized with the help of disnarration. In The City of Glass, who was primarily assumed to be a third person omniscient narrator makes an appearance at the end and narrates the rest of the story in first person, thus forcing the reader to backtrack and question the entire ordeal of third person narration and also suspect the identities of the narrator and the protagonist. At the fictional level, also, the trilogy explores a range of possibilities through the device of disnarration. Each novella in the trilogy aspires to be a detective

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fiction but ends up being otherwise in its rejection of a definitive end. The trilogy contains autobiographical elements. But the sceptre of disnarration prevents them from getting unified and the authorial persona dissolves into a plurality of indefinite selves. The inter-textual references indicate what couldve happened but didnt in earlier works of fiction, such as, Nathaniel Hawthornes Wakefield or Fanshawe. The aim of the paper is to analyze the several layers of disnarration in the trilogy in order to discover newer interpretations and examine whether the three novellas are ultimately the re-telling of the same story, where each novella makes the previous one(s) impossible by representing the possibility that the otherwise might have actually happened. 14 Thedisnarrated narrator: Strategy in The Kiss of the Spider Woman Sucheta Bhattacharya Bio-note: Sucheta Bhattacharya is Associate Professor at Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. She is the recipient of CRASSH-Charles Wallace fellow 2011-12. Her teaching interests are Modernist literature, Renaissance literature, 19th century literature, LatinAmerican literature, Translation studies, Comparative Theories and methodology. Her research interest is Victorian literature. Abstract: Manuel Puigs 1976 novel The Kiss of the Spider Woman is one of the most tantalizing novels to come out in the 20th century, constantly defying attempts to categorize it. Generically confusing, this novel mainly uses the mimetic mode with characters carrying the story forward through dialogues with their names not being mentioned anywhere. The other narrative device consists of use of

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forms of impersonal official documents and reports. In addition to these, the pervasive use of footnotes referring to theories related to homosexuality offers a parallel narrative to the one carried through the fictional construct. The other powerful device is the stories from popular cinema that are narrated by one of the characters raising questions about elitism and purism of aesthetics. What is most intriguing in the novel however is the total absence of the narrator. The non-diegetic approach, the escapist film-stories and the total withdrawal of the third person narrator carry a political message , a comment on the bourgeois tendency toward non-involvement which is constantly and visually undercut by the footnotes showing absorption in different issues. This novel apparently does not have any disnarrated stories. Different modes capture different facets of the problems of homosexuality and political activism yet the various modes obfuscates the readers understanding offering too many angles and rendering everything tellable. I want to explore if the narrators absence/withdrawal from the narrative itself becomes a successful narrative strategy in Kiss of the Spider Woman or does this affect the tellability of the story by dislocating it from its novelistic mooring. 15

Do These Ruins Narrate our past? An examination of memory and archive in


W.G. Sebalds texts Krishnan Unni P Bio-note: Krishnan Unni P. teaches English Literature in Deshbandhu College at Delhi University, New Delhi. He has edited a book on Gabriel Garcia Marquezs The

Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Worldview Publications) and authored a book of


essays in Malayalam called Krushithante Manangal (The Dimensions of the Crucified).He is a creative writer in English and Malayalam and his poems

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,articles and reviews have appeared in national and international journals and magazines. His book on Contemporary Art Practices in India and Platforms of Resistance is due for publication. He has presented papers in the University of Nottingham, U.K, Cairo University (Egypt) and in the national University of Brussels and at several other universities in India. He is a board of studies member in the Kashmir University, Sri Nagar and is a nominated member in the Culture Studies department in Cairo University. His areas of interests are the Third World literatures and films, gender discourse, changing patterns of sexual dissidence and the politics of the dispossessed concerned with music, football and popular culture. Abstract: Articulated from the standpoint of the post-holocaust Europe and disnarrated from the viewpoint of the thematic and semantic concerns, W.G. Sebalds texts are the exposition of the other quasi-methodological and counter-productive verve of the last vein of the twentieth century narration. Out of the veritable questions arising in the texts of Sebald, the foremost one seems to be the role of the disjunctive memory to assimilate the lost and uneven histories and stories of the war-torn Europe. Both in Austerlitz and in The Emigrants, Sebald has provided this careful and yet dissolved nature of memory as the counter mechanism of the act of simple recollection. In this paper, I will examine how in Sebalds narratives this counter mechanism produces a narrative dislocation and how this dislocation finally produces the disnarratives of our past that are unevenly produced in contemporary times. The texts under discussion include The Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants and

Austerlitz. The fundamental question this paper would try to address would be
the issue of the new memory or rather post- memory (Paraphrasing the term of Marianne Hirsch) in the construction of the new geographical and mental

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space of the narratives. The seamless continuity between the situational nonpositionality of the events and issues in Sebalds texts have their roots in the undocumented pasts and in a paradigmatic system of ruins. An attempt would be provided to locate the disnarrated issues of language and photographs , which repeatedly figure in Sebalds texts to mark the histories of our times. Next, this paper would examine the role of memory and archive in the process of constructing a new cognitive mapping of the European continent. Does the role of archiving really help in the mapping of the untold and unnarrated past of the post-holocaust Europe? This will be a central question this paper will be addressing. If the pitfalls in archiving the past is well chartered out by the

disnarration, will such narration ever serve the purpose of a textual and
thematic understanding in our time? This question will be looked at by locating the new theoretical postulations of memory and archive in Sebalds texts and finally an attempt would be given to understand and explicate the political connotations of disnarration, as its aims are more deviant and diverse in the theoretical spectrum of our times. 16 The Narrated, the Denarrated and the Disnarrated in the Representation of Trauma in Mirza Waheeds The Collaborator and Siddhartha Gigoos The

Garden of Solitude
Biju M.A. Bio-note: Biju M.A. Research Scholar Pondicherry University

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Abstract: Experiences of pain, agony, and suffering are often considered as nonnarrativisable. There are narratives that depict the unrepresentable traumatic experiences. Through such narratives the characters try to relive the experiences of pain and fear of the horrendous events they have witnessed though they are distanced temporally and spatially. Witnessing to the painful events through narratives is often beset with inherent forgetting (Caruth). In other words the narrated trauma entails conscious or unconscious forgetting. It is this intermittent recalling and forgetting that makes the trauma narratives significant. The gaps and silences between remembering and forgetting constitute the alter narrative that is denied expression. But there are explicit hints and references of the forgetfulness in such narratives. The narrated trauma implies the disnarrated events, and situations which are referred to and the alternative paths the narrative might have taken but does not. Often the explicit denials or the denarration becomes characteristic of such narratives. This paper examines how the disnarrated contributes to the narrativisation of trauma in Mirza Waheeds novel The Collaborator. It also looks into how the narrated, denarrated and the disnarrated intersect each other to demonstrate the intensity of the trauma. Through an unnamed adolescent narrator, the novel recounts the traumatic experiences of the narrator in the wake of insurgency and armed conflict in the Kashmir valley. Self indulgence into the narrators own agony denies expressions to the trauma experienced by others, though they are referred in the novel. The possible worlds of trauma referred but not narrated in the novel might have given different directions to the narrative and a different experience to the reader. This paper also looks into The Garden of Solitude, a novel by Siddhartha Gigoo as an alter narrative to The Collaborator since it also represents the trauma experienced in Kashmir. The narrated world of The

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Garden of Solitude suffers from the absence of the disnarrated while the presence of the disnarrated attributes reliability and narrativity to The

Collaborator. It can be inferred that the presence or the absence of the


disnarrated has its effect on narrativising the experiences of trauma. Does the politics of narration and of the narrator determines the disnarrated in the narratives of trauma? Kerwin Lee Klein argues that it is significant to find out who is doing remembering and forgetting in the present memory industry of narratives. Its quite political as it refers to the narrator and creator of the narratives of trauma as they shut the possibilities of fictional worlds in the novel through the disnarrated.

17 Liminal spaces of exchange: arrival as departure and departure as arrival Vijaya Singh Bio-note: Vijaya Singh teaches English Literature at the Regional Institute of English, Chandigarh. Her Phd was on the film adaptations of E.M. Forsters Novels from Rajasthan University, Jaipur. She has been a Fulbright fellow at the Department of Cinema Studies in New York University. She has also been a fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla and submitted a monograph on train journeys in Hindi cinema to the Institute. Currently she is one of the four International scholars selected by the Society for History of Technology, University of Virginia.

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Abstract: The railway station and the train compartment are examples of non-places or liminal spaces in modern times. Writers and filmmakers have used the infinite potential of such charged places for staging narratives of arrivals and departures. In SachidanandVatsayenAjneyasnovelNadikeDweep or Islands in

the Stream, both the railway station and the third class train compartment
function to open up intimate crevices of the narrative. It is precisely because the station and the compartment are non-places/ transitory spaces that the narrative turns the logic of public spaces into private spaces for conversations, sharing and eventually love; and private spaces -as homes, for example- become spaces of humiliation, hurt and suffering. Published in 1952, the novel is written in the background of wars, scientific breakthroughs, and alienation of humanity through modernity. The desperate desire of the novel is to fuse the scientific and the artistic so as to save the rational from its own irrational collapse. To that extent the industrial spaces of the railways become the testing ground for examining the emergence of newer relationships and newer aesthetics. These newer spaces function to provide an escape from stifling societal expectations to individuals trapped in oppressive social mores. Eventually it turns out however that the delicious promise of liberation that these spaces hold out is undermined by their own excesses. These spaces function as retardatory devices leading to choices gone awry and closures that are most dissatisfactory. END OF ABSTRACTS

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