Dr. Anker’s Seminar On Paradox: The Claims of Theory

On Friday, November 4, at 1 PM, Dr. Anker will lead a seminar related to On Paradox. This event will take place in the Campus Y, Room 207, and is open to UNC grad students. You can register for the workshop on Eventbrite. (Note that we will be updating the registration link with a PDF of the introduction to On Paradox, which Dr. Anker would like to discuss during the seminar.)

Dr. Anker is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Associate Member of the Law Faculty at Cornell University. She has published and taught in the areas of law and literature, human rights and humanitarianism, novel studies, literary criticism, postcolonial studies, immigration and citizenship, contemporary world literature, and legal and political theory. In On Paradox, she 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.