Buchcover Spaces of Dissension

Knowledges and Contradictions in Premodern Narratives.

Contribution

Elisabeth Lienert

2019

Contradiction is not just a (post-)modern phenomenon. In premodern narratives, conflicting concepts and logical inconsistencies are omnipresent. This paper focuses on contradictions interdependent with knowledge: Traditional narratives may aggregate different versions of matters rooted in collective memory (heroic epic) or authoritative sources (romances of antiquity), sometimes without concern for the consistency of their own story. Narrative texts may use contradiction for didactic purposes. Contradictions may result in both construction and deconstruction of knowledge. Strategies of irritation and ambiguity involve recipients in the production of meaning. Thus, the concept of contradiction is apt to redefine premodern narrative strategies.

In Lossau, Julia, Daniel Schmidt-Brücken, Ingo H. Warnke (eds.) Spaces of Dissension. Towards a New Perspective on Contradiction (Reihe Contradiction Studies). Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 19-37.

print
ISBN: 978-3-658-25989-1

eBook
ISBN: 978-3-658-25990-7

Back to overview
idea of democratic critique

“If you think that acts of contradicting someone always need to point to better solutions, you haven’t really understood the idea of democratic critique.”

Martin Nonhoff
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
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
name contradiction

“Contradiction becomes real where someone names contradiction.”

Ingo H. Warnke
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