Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Lienert

My discipline, Medieval and Early Modern German Literary Studies, is concerned with German texts from their beginnings to around 1600, including the question of cultural, historical, medial, and discursive conditions and, above all, the European context of pre-modern literature. I am a philologist by training, with research interests in the history of manuscript transmission and in editing; in addition, I have a strong focus on the study of narration.

Contradictions are omnipresent in pre-modern texts: contradictory conceptualizations, self-contradictions and counter-discursivity, breaks in expectations and narrative fractures. Unsurprisingly, then, I have been exploring contradictory narratives for several years now: in an exploratory project on contradiction as a narrative principle in the pre-modern period, in two conferences and anthologies on poetics of contradiction and contradictory figures in pre-modern narrative, in a teaching and book project entitled “Narrating in Contradiction”, as well as in a new DFG-funded project entitled “Narrative fractures. Heterogeneity in early German Prose” (with Thomas Althaus).

Guiding questions in my research are: What appears as contradiction and who perceives contradictions? What is the relationship between the creation of meaning through narration and the denial of meaning (or increased complexity of meaning) through contradictions? How does a text-specific tension between contradiction and coherence take shape? What role can the postulate of non-contradiction play in the historically different narrative logics of the pre-modern era? Is contradictoriness and/or a tolerance for contradictions part of the alterity of pre-modern literature depending on different medial conditions? What constitutes contradictory characters? How are contradictory bodies of knowledge and norms narratively negotiated? How do controversial conceptualizations, narrative strategies of dealing with the contradictory, acts of rejoinder, and potential counter-discursivity relate to each other in the texts?

Within the RTG, my field of study and I stand for an approach that pays attention to the historicity and discursivity of contradiction, in particular to a pre-modern tradition of tolerance for contradictions, as well as investigations into the textuality of the contradictory in a historical perspective.

Project proposals on the textuality of the contradictory in German-language texts of the Middle Ages and Early Modern period up to around 1600 are welcome.

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ideal of a contradiction-free world

“Science has long been animated by the ideal of a contradiction-free world in which logical orders could merge with society, politics, culture and language. In the GRC Contradiction Studies we are working on ways of describing the multiplicity and complexity, the danger and beauty of our worlds that clearly go beyond concepts of freedom from contradiction.”

Michi Knecht
Afterlife of colonialism

“Contradiction comes in many different forms. None is so debilitating than when the coloniser transitions, textually not politically, to decoloniality without taking the responsibility for the afterlife of colonialism, which they continue to benefit from. Self-examination and self-interrogation of the relations of coloniality, a necessity, seem nearly impossible for the coloniser who continues to act as beneficiary, masked in the new-found language of White fragility, devoid of an ethical responsibility of the very system of White domination they claim to be against.” (Black Consciousness and the Politics of the Flesh)

Rozena Maart
hierarchy of norms

“If social contradictions are reflected in law, law cannot form a hierarchy of norms free of contradictions.”

Andreas Fischer-Lescano
Bhabha on enlightenment and coloniality

“Homi Bhabha says about the contradiction between the ideals of the enlightenment, claims to democracy and solidarity and simultaneous colonization and ongoing coloniality: ‘That ideological tension, visible in the history of the West as a despotic power, at the very moment of the birth of democracy and modernity, has not been adequately written in a contradictory and contrapuntal discourse of tradition.’”

Kerstin Knopf
power and resistance

“Michel Foucault says: “Where there is power, there is resistance, and […] this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (History of Sexuality I, The Will to Knowledge, 1976, p. 95)”

Gisela Febel