This contribution (re-)examines the description and multiple functions of selected antagonists in courtly romance around 1200. Excepting romance of antiquity, one rarely encounters equal opponents who represent a contrary system of values and continue to take consequent action against the hero until the end. The texts are centered on their protagonists, lacking an equal narrative counterpart. Hence, the applicability of the concept ‘antagonist’ might be called into question for Arthurian, grail, and Tristan romance.


Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur, 147(4): 419-436.

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earthing

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

Julia Lossau
hierarchy of norms

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

Andreas Fischer-Lescano
every day

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

Gisela Febel
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
city

“The city is a laboratory not only of modernity, but also of contradiction.”

Julia Lossau