Editorial — Page 6:
26 For the purpose or fathoming the potential reach of a concept of eccentricity we conducted a graduate seminar in the summer term of 2009 dedicated to the exploration of “Literatures of Eccentricity.” We invited graduate and some doctoral students to work with us on various literary and theoretical texts, a task they took to with great enthusiasm and intelligent alertness so that the experience was a source of enlightenment for all of us. For the most part, the works presented here are the works of participants in this seminar and of the doctoral programme Abgrenzung, Ausgrenzung, Entgrenzung: Gender als Prozess und Resultat von Grenzziehungen. As our seminar was focused on eccentricity as a technique rather than on eccentrics, we invited Brian Comfort, a specialist in American historical and cultural studies, to work on those aspects our seminar had tended to ignore by contributing his expertise in eccentrics (the personality type) to the collection.
27 As it seemed useful to first detach a theory of eccentricity from gender concerns, Moritz Hildt’s essay provides an investigation of how eccentricity may be imagined as a general personality trait and as a general literary technique by drawing on Helmuth Plessner’s very prominent use of the word in his hypothesis of the “eccentric positionality” of human beings. Bettina Schreck sets off the dynamics of centre and periphery as defined by Juri Lotman and as evidenced in the development of literary canons against the work of a prominent member of the lesbian community of the Paris Left Bank in the 1920s, Natalie Barney’s The One Who is Legion, which seeks to deterritorialize gender and sexuality altogether in a model of “identity” that is profoundly a-centric. Rebecca Hahn investigates the short stories of Karen Blixen with Ina Schabert’s concept of the foot-off-the-ground novel and Queer Theory in mind. Brian Comfort, finally, investigates the use of eccentric characters in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and in American culture at large.