Introduction: Extraordinary - Ordinary / gewöhnlich-außergewöhnlich

The intersection of the ordinary and the extraordinary is a fascinating and complex terrain. Although the routines and the materiality of the everyday are the very “foundation of experience”, precisely because they are so often encountered they remain quite invisible unless called specifically to our attention. Once closely observed, or when re-presented as art, however, the familiar loses its ordinariness, becoming unfamiliar and exceptional. The two concepts are therefore always intertwined and daily experience itself is structured by the move “between registers of the everyday and the extraordinary”. One of the central functions of art and literature has been to offer a means of extending our field of vision, allowing us to glimpse the relationship between these two dimensions of experience, and raising questions about the value systems and modes of perception at work in the shift between them. The contributions to this year’s special themed section of Germanistik in Ireland are all concerned, in varying ways, with the intersection between the familiar or everyday and the unfamiliar or exceptional in German-language literary texts from the nineteenth century until the present day.