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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prison of difference

“‘Contradiction is the prison of difference‘ writes the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Worlds of Contradiction asks: how can we explain and describe the world without making it more coherent and systematic than it is?”

Michi Knecht
coherence in thought

“The imperative of non-contradiction generally produces a coherence in thought that is often at odds with social complexities.”

Yan Suarsana
earthing

“Geography as a discipline stands for a certain worlding, if not earthing, of contradiction, in both theoretical and pracitcal respect.”

Julia Lossau
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
every day

“Living in contradictions is what we experience every day. Why do we know so little about it?”

Gisela Febel