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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problem to be solved

“Contradiction is not primarily a problem to be solved but a motor we cannot do without.”

Martin Nonhoff
space

“According to Niklas Luhmann, space is a ‘special facility to negate contradictions’”.

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
city

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

Julia Lossau
relational

“At first I thought contradiction was always a relational thing; but the more I ponder it, the more I think contradiction creates relation.”

Ingo H. Warnke