In 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, diversified theory toolkit that can help theorists escape the seductions and traps of paradox.

Elizabeth S. Anker is Professor of Law and Associate Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University, coeditor of Critique and Postcritique, also published by Duke University Press, and author of Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature.

Acknowledgments  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