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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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
paradox

“The basis of law is not an idea as a systematic unified principle but a paradox.”

Andreas Fischer-Lescano
city

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

Julia Lossau
limits

“Resistance is a democratic right, sometimes a duty. With literature we can find models for this right and think about its limits.”

Gisela Febel
driver

“Contradictions are an important driver of scientific practice and knowledge.”

Norman Sieroka