In 2001's Reality Hunger, David Shields mashed together quotes in a collage manifesto that praised
antinarrative tendencies, antigenre hybrids, and a future literature without regard for such outdated categories as "fiction" and "nonfiction."
McGann defends this kind of poetry as
antinarrative and nonnarrative, which "exemplifies a significant strand of postmodernist writing" while it "deploys a consciously antithetical political content" (1987, 634).
Featuring imagined characters, self-projection figures, and a cat, combined with historical memory, myths, and biblical stories, Mikhailichenko and Nesis discuss the question of sacrifice and create a metaphysical
antinarrative.
Time lines narrativize what would otherwise appear as an
antinarrative and antihermeneutic development of spatial-structural digital archives that could risk cutting off links back to the bridging of cosmic and experiential time.
What she produces instead is a complex and nuanced study, one that might be termed an "antiheroic
antinarrative."
In ten essays, the collection transcends narrow conceptions of narrative,
antinarrative, and metanarrative.
Moreover, Gerald Prince in his Dictionary of Narratology quite tellingly describes Molloy as an "
antinarrative" because it adopts the "trappings of narrative" but "systematically" calls "narrative logic and narrative conventions into question" (6).
producing not so much a novelistic narrative as an (...)
antinarrative,
to represent an unregimented one." Lest this Adornian "respite from regimentation" be interpreted as "too privatized" (and Eurocentric), said concludes tellingly by demonstrating the "public" (and Eastern) face of this revocational vocation--this radical
antinarrative sense of "beginning"--in the provocative words of "an Islamic intellectual like Ali Shariati, "a prime force in the early days of the Iranian Revolution, when his attack on 'the true, straight path, this smooth and sacred highway'--organized orthodoxy--contrasted with the devastations of constant migration":
Erecting his structures on the flat, unstable plain of a perpetual present, Liu gives form to a kind of
antinarrative, not so much evoking history as figuring its loss.
Viewed in these terms, the modernist writers' attempt at "finding a space for the 'inhuman' (
antinarrative) within the ostensibly 'human' (narrative)" results in a foregrounding of the "performative potential of narrative," its machine-like workings.