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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

Back to overview
Is contradiction eurocentric?

“Is contradiction a eurocentric concept, operational phenomenon, and instrument of power?”

Kerstin Knopf
interstice

“The contradiction of law in Derrida lies in the interstice that separates the impossibility of deconstructing justice from the possibility of deconstructing law.”

Andreas Fischer-Lescano
every day

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

Gisela Febel
city

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

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