cover "Widersprüchliche Figuren in tormoderner Erzählliteratur"

Contradictory characters are characters whose internal characterization in the text is contradictory or who are designed in and as a contradiction to discourses and traditions external to the text. The volume contains case studies from Virgil to the early New High German prose novel and the modern reception of the Nibelungen, combined with methodological considerations in the field of tension between character narratology, dialog research, historical anthropology and discourse analysis. The peculiarities of medieval-early modern narrative (above all the trans-textuality of many characters and their connection to plot or script) become just as clear as the necessity of reflecting on epochal clichés. The contributions invite us to think further about contradiction as a category of character narratology.


BmE Themen – Heft 6

DOI: 10.25619/BmE_H202035

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l’illusion d’une unité

“Foucault speaks of contradiction as l’illusion d’une unité.”

Ingo H. Warnke
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
Is contradiction eurocentric?

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

Kerstin Knopf
every day

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

Gisela Febel
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