Off Centre.

Works cited

Anderson, Howard. “Preface,” in: Sterne 1980, vii-ix.

Booth, Wayne. “Did Sterne Complete Tristram Shandy?” [1951]. Reprinted in Sterne 1980, 532-548.

Bowman Piper, William. “Tristram’s Digressive Artistry.” [1966]. Reprinted in Sterne 1980, 548-562.

Dinesen, Isak. Seven Gothic Tales. [1931]. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.

Frankfurt, Harry G. The Importance of What We Care About. Cambridge: CUP. 1988.

Hartly, Lodwick. Laurence Sterne in the Twentieth Century: An Essay and a Bibliography of Sternean Studies 1900-1965. Chapel Hill: University of Carolina Press. 1966.

Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, comps. A Greek-English Lexicon. Rev. and aug. throughout by Henry Stuart Jones. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1953.

Lindgren, Astrid. The Adventures of Pippi Longstocking. Transl. by Michael Chesworth. [1950-1959]. New York: Viking Books 1997.

Nagel, Thomas. The View from Nowhere. Oxford: OUP. 1986.

Olshin, Toby A. “Genre and Tristram Shandy: The Novel of Quickness.” [1971]. Reprinted in Sterne 1980, 521-532.

Plessner, Helmuth. Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 4, Ed. by Günter Dux et. al. [1928]. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1981.

Sitwell, Edith. English Eccentrics. [1933]. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1958.

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Townsend-Warner, Sylvia. Lolly Willowes. [1926]. London: Virago Press, 2000.

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Notes

• 1) References to Tristram Shandy are given in the following form: book in Roman numbers, chapter in Arabic numbers, and page number in the Norton Critical Edition.
• 2) This is the result of a personal survey I did with approximately 20 participants.
• 3) Sitwell, of course, talks about an exaggeration of the attitudes common to life. As will become clear on the following pages, my own concept of eccentricity will be somewhat different and it would be interesting to go into the differences between Sitwell’s and my concept.
• 4) The thought that caring about oneself is distinctly human, on which Plessner draws here, became only recently very popular in contemporary ethics through the writings of Harry G. Frankfurt, see for example his collection of essays entitled The Importance of What We Care About (1988).
• 5) Note that this corresponds to the dual aspect Plessner detects in the Außenwelt: The experience of my body as my own body (Leib) and, at the same time, as just an object among others (Körperding).
• 6) An easy example is our attitude towards death. From the objective viewpoint, it is perfectly conceivable that, since we are a living organism, we will have to die at some point in time, just like every other creature does. However, from the subjective perspective, our own death is simply not conceivable, since here the “I” is the centre of the world (Nagel, chapter XI).
• 7) Notice the ingenious title of Thomas Nagel’s book: The View from Nowhere of course refers to the objective viewpoint, but read as The View from Now Here additionally refers to the subjective viewpoint.
• 8) It is quite an interesting aspect that children’s literature often employs eccentric main protagonists. But there are numerous other examples to be found in the vast history of literature, ranging from William Shakespeare’s Richard III (1591) and Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605/15) to more recent books such as Sylvia Townsend-Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926) and Austerlitz (2001) by W.G. Sebald.
• 9) This attraction of the eccentric, although a crucial phenomenon in this context, would need much more analyzing than I am presently capable of, given the scope of this paper. I will therefore leave it at these very preliminary remarks.
• 10) Hartley notes a peculiar consequence of this which should be very dissatisfying to critics: “The irony is that the critic who attempts to impose any kind of system on Tristam Shandy immediately assumes the role of Tristram’s father” (498).