In other words, a literary dialectic that operates dynamically within the narrative text gets transformed into a theoretical contradiction, presenting students of literature with an unpalatable choice: language or reference, structure or individuality.
Ian Woloch, The One vs. the Many p. 17.
Another example of Woloch casting the dialectic as its opposite: who could possibly speak of a dialectic turning into a contradiction, into its precondition? We also catch a whiff of what Fred Jameson endorsed as a “celebration of the dialectic” – these mean authors took my beautiful dialectic and turned it into a nasty contradiction! – but, as Adorno knew, dialectics is the ontology of the wrong state of things, of a world being torn apart by its own contradictions, and is thus the last thing we should celebrate. Though it would make no sense to turn the dialectic into contradiction, we should do everything in our power to usher it out the door.
