On Paradox

“Elizabeth S. Anker brilliantly diagnoses the critical preoccupation with paradox that, while precipitated by the experience of political failure and powerlessness, has hardened into a pat consensus and itself proved a blind alley politically. Her call for an integrative criticism that would put paradox in its place, both in discussions of rights and beyond, deserves the widest possible hearing across literature and law.” - Samuel Moyn, author of Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War

“Elizabeth S. Anker demonstrates that although paradox has become the hallmark of the humanities, it promotes neither the best criticism nor the best politics. By alerting us to how readily we default to paradox, On Paradox will make its readers into better thinkers.” - Sharon Marcus, Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

“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

"As an intellectual and institutional history of critique, On Paradox offers a compelling explanation for the contemporary malaise of theory and critique." - J Daniel Elam, Law & Literature

"What happens when you try to critique a paradox by using a paradox? This is the mesmerizingly encyclopedic project of Elizabeth Anker’s On Paradox. Reading her book is like entering a haunted hall of mirrors: You get sudden insights down infinite hallways, deep into some tangle of theology, aesthetics, and politics—you run after them, and then you turn around to find them right behind you. Paradoxes are weirdly charismatic and slippery in this book." - Eleanor Courtemanche, Public Books