Detailed Table of Contents
- Ingrid Hotz-Davies and Stefanie Gropper: Editorial
- Author's Bio: Ingrid Hotz-Davies is professor for English Literature and Gender Studies at the University of Tübingen. She gained her degrees from Munich University and Dalhousie University. She is interested in all forms of literary subterfuge and all manner of communication under conditions of (self)-censorship. Stefanie Gropper is professor for Scandinavian literatures at the University of Tübingen. She is a medievalist with a strong interest also in contemporary literature. In recent years, next to her interest in eccentricity, she has been working especially on translations as a theoretical and practical field in medieval studies.
- Moritz Hildt: Towards a Theory of Eccentricity
- Abstract: This essay seeks to develop a literary theory of eccentricity taking as its point of departure everyday usages of the word eccentric, Helmuth Plessner’s notion of the eccentric positionality of human beings, and Thomas Nagel’s model of the interplay of subjective and objective viewpoints in human (self)positioning. Its key assumption is that eccentricity should be thought of as an attitude to life determined by a systematic indifference to “objective,” external viewpoints and values. While this is taken to characterize eccentricity as a personality trait, by extension the concept can then be made to also work for literary texts. These are also be seen to be indifferent to important external determinants, thus producing the “eccentric text.” These suggestions are tested and developed in an analysis of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760-1767), which is being read as a novel featuring both eccentric characters and an eccentric literary technique.
- Author's Bio: Moritz Hildt studied English Literature and Philosophy at the Albert-Ludwig-Universität Freiburg and Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tuebingen. Currently, he is finishing his master’s thesis and will graduate in summer 2010. His research interests focus on contemporary fiction with an emphasis on realist elements in postmodern literature and cinema, and on the concept of eccentric literature.
- Bettina Schreck: Eccentricity and Deterritorialization in Natalie Barney’s “The One Who is Legion”
- Abstract: Abstract: Rather than focusing on eccentricity as a character trait in human beings or literary characters, this essay engages with Natalie Barney’s experimental novel The One Who is Legion (1930) in order to demonstrate how its techniques, in following a Deleuzian trajectory of deterritorialization, are “eccentric” in the sense that they are designed to elude altogether any binary dynamics of the centre and its peripheries. Drawing on Yuri Lotman’s model of the semiosphere as a structure defined by a centre, a periphery and a boundary, the essay shows how Barney’s novel resists the normalizing attempts of a criticism eager to recover a tradition of “lesbian” writing by insisting on its own eccentric conceptions of gender and sexuality. The “eccentric” is here a literary technique that seeks to deviate from an identified centre in unforeseeable, as it were “elliptical,” ways.
- Author's Bio: Bettina Schreck studied German and English literature at the University of Tübingen; M.A. thesis "Sedgwick Revisited - The Lesbian Closet in Selected Irish Fiction"; Co-editor of "Freiburger Geschlechterstudien"; Publications [forthcoming May 2010]: "Gender Studies" (transcript Verlag, Reihe Basis-Skripte) Hrsg. Franziska Schößler, Franziska Bergmann, Bettina Schreck.
- Brian Comfort: Eccentricity and Masculinity in “Twin Peaks”
- Abstract: This essay asks the question: what is the function of eccentrics in American culture and attaches this question to recent research in “freaks.“ It argues that eccentrics occupy an ambiguous place in the American imagination, providing both incentives for a broadening of normative horizons and models of the human to be distrusted and feared. Using David Lynch’s television series Twin Peaks as its example, the essay shows how eccentric characters are used to push the boundaries of acceptable masculinities.
- Author's Bio: Brian Comfort is a PhD student in the department of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is studying modern U.S. cultural history. In particular, he has been investigating eccentrics and the role they play in U.S. culture.
- Rebecca Kate Hahn: Isak Dinesen’s “The Deluge at Norderney” and Eccentric Indifference
- Abstract: Taking Isak Dinesen’s short story “The Deluge at Norderney” as its example, this essay explores the ramifications of Ina Schabert’s definition and characterization of the “foot-off-the-ground novel” as a model for thinking eccentric literature. In this, it turns on the idea of indifference as a key component and technique of eccentricity. While in the realm of gender and sexuality “queer” may be a strong rival for the “eccentric,” the essay shows that eccentric indifference follows a logic which sets it apart from the interventionist aesthetics of queer.
- Author's Bio: Rebecca Kate Hahn is an M.A. student of English and German literature at the Eberhard-Karls University Tübingen with a special interest in "Foot-off-the-Ground“ texts and Queer Studies. She has also studied at Stuttgart University and Leicester University, England. At present she is working on her M.A. dissertation on Sylvia Townsend-Warner, Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) und Stevie Smith.