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Widerspruch als Erzählprinzip in der Vormoderne? Eine Projektskizze

Contribution

Elisabeth Lienert

2017

In premodern narratives contradictions are omnipresent – conflicting concepts, logical inconsistencies, acts of objection. In a narratological perspective ›contradiction‹ – conflicts of incompatible knowledges and narrative patterns; inconsistencies in or between speech (by narrator or characters) and action; contradictory or inconsistent information and motivation – is apt to subvert, complicate, or enrich the textual production of meaning. The project ›Contradiction as a Narrative Principle in Premodern Narrative‹ (University of Bremen) explores different types of contradictions in medieval epic and romance.

Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 139: 69–90.

DOI: 10.1515/bgsl-2017-0003

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

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

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“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.’”

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