Description
Book SynopsisIn
On Paradox literary and legal scholar Elizabeth S. Anker contends that faith in the logic of paradox has been the cornerstone of left intellectualism since the second half of the twentieth century. She attributes the ubiquity of paradox in the humanities to its appeal as an incisive tool for exposing and dismantling hierarchies. Tracing the ascent of paradox in theories of modernity, in rights discourse, in the history of literary criticism and the linguistic turn, and in the transformation of the liberal arts in higher education, Anker suggests that paradox not only generates the very exclusions it critiques but also creates a disempowering haze of indecision. She shows that reasoning through paradox has become deeply problematic: it engrains a startling homogeneity of thought while undercutting the commitment to social justice that remains a guiding imperative of theory. Rather than calling for a wholesale abandonment of such reasoning, Anker argues for an expanded, diversi
Trade Review“The novelty of [Anker’s] approach is to identify theory’s style of thought with a fatal attraction to paradox, to something that appears absurd or contradictory but is actually true. . . . Anker illuminates both why theory has migrated so effectively beyond the academy and also how its self-replicating endlessness gives a startling large-scale intellectual uniformity to the pronouncements of elite institutions and right-wing conspiracists alike.” -- Michael W. Clune * Los Angeles Review of Books *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction: On Paradox 1
1. All That Is Solid Melts into Paradox: The Idea of Modernity 29
2. Ontologizing the Paradoxes of Rights, or the Anti-legalism of Theory 73
Interlude. Anatomy of Paradox, or a Brief History of Aesthetic Theory 112
3. Redeeming Rights, or the Ethics and Politics of Paradox 138
4. The Politics of Exclusion 181
5. The Pedagogy of Paradox 221
Interlude. A Different Kind of Theory 261
6. What Holds Things Together: Toward an Integrative Criticism 266
Notes 313
Bibliography 335
Index
