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Our Broad Present
Considering a range of present-day phenomena, from the immediacy effects of literature to the impact of hypercommunication, globalization, and sports, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht notes an important shift in our relationship to history and the passage of time. Although we continue to use concepts inherited from a ÒhistoricistÓ viewpoint, a notion of time articulated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the actual construction of time in which we live in today, which shapes our perceptions, experiences, and actions, is no longer historicist. Without fully realizing it, we now inhabit a new, unnamed space in which the Òclosed futureÓ and Òever-available pastÓ (a past we have not managed ...
Production of Presence
This book offers a personalized account of some of the central theoretical movements in literary studies and in the humanities over the past thirty years, together with an equally personal view of a possible future. It develops the provocative thesis that interpretation alone cannot do justice to the dimension in which cultural phenomena and cultural events become tangible and have an impact on us.
In Praise of Athletic Beauty
This book looks beyond the usual explanations of why sports fascinates, and also strives for a language that can frame the pleasure we take in watching athletic events. Gumbrecht argues that the fascination with watching sports is probably the most popular and potent contemporary form of aesthetic experience.
Crowds
Anyone who has ever experienced a sporting event in a large stadium knows the energy that emanates from stands full of fans cheering on their teams. Although "the masses" have long held a thoroughly bad reputation in politics and culture, literary critic and avid sports fan Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht finds powerful, as yet unexplored reasons to sing the praises of crowds. Drawing on his experiences as a spectator in the stadiums of South America, Germany, and the US, Gumbrecht presents the stadium as "a ritual of intensity," thereby offering a different lens through which we might capture and even appreciate the dynamic of the masses. In presenting this alternate view, Gumbrecht enters into conversation with thinkers who were more critical of the potential of the masses, such as Gustave Le Bon, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, José Ortega y Gasset, Elias Canetti, Siegfried Kracauer, T. W. Adorno, or Max Horkheimer. A preface explores college crowds as a uniquely specific phenomenon of American culture. Pairing philosophical rigor with the enthusiasm of a true fan, Gumbrecht writes from the inside and suggests that being part of a crowd opens us up to an experience beyond ourselves.
The Powers of Philology
Philology--the discovery, editing, and presentation of historical texts--was once a firmly established discipline that formed the core study for students across a wide range of linguistic and literary fields. Although philology departments are steadily disappearing from contemporary educational establishments, in this book Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht demonstrates that the problems, standards, and methods of philology remain as vital as ever. For two and a half millennia philologists have viewed themselves as the modest heirs and curators of their textual past's most glorious periods, collecting and editing text fragments, historicizing them and adding commentary, and ultimately teaching them to co...
In 1926
In this thoroughly innovative work, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht evokes the year 1926 through explorations of such things as bars, boxing, movie palaces, hunger artists, airplanes, hair gel, bullfighting, film stardom and dance crazes. From the vantage points of Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York, the reader is allowed multiple itineraries, ultimately becoming immersed in the activities, entertainments, and thought patterns of the citizens of 1926.
Prose of the World
A lively examination of the life and work of one of the great Enlightenment intellectuals Philosopher, translator, novelist, art critic, and editor of the Encyclopédie, Denis Diderot was one of the liveliest figures of the Enlightenment. But how might we delineate the contours of his diverse oeuvre, which, unlike the works of his contemporaries, Voltaire, Rousseau, Schiller, Kant, or Hume, is clearly characterized by a centrifugal dynamic? Taking Hegel's fascinated irritation with Diderot's work as a starting point, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht explores the question of this extraordinary intellectual's place in the legacy of the eighteenth century. While Diderot shared most of the concerns typical...
Prose of the World
Philosopher and translator, novelist, art critic, and editor of the "Encyclopédie," Denis Diderot was one of the liveliest figures within the European Enlightenment. But how might we delineate the contours of his diverse oeuvre, which, unlike the works of his contemporaries Voltaire, Rousseau, Schiller, Kant, or Hume, is characterized by a clearly centrifugal dynamic? Taking Hegel's fascinated irritation with Diderot's work as a starting point, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht explores the question of this extraordinary intellectual's place in the legacy of the eighteenth century. While Diderot shared most of the concerns typically attributed to his time, the ways in which he coped with them do not fu...
Materialities of Communication
The essays in this volume refers to an epistemological borderline, a stage of transition in Western thought. Within the academic field of the humanities, this transition can be described as a movement away from the identification of meaning toward problems concerning the conditions and forms of meaning-constitution.
Mapping Benjamin
Since its publication in 1936, Walter Benjamin’s "Artwork” essay has become a canonical text about the status and place of the fine arts in modern mass culture. Benjamin was especially concerned with the ability of new technologies--notably film, sound recording, and photography--to reproduce works of art in great number. Benjamin could not have foreseen the explosion of imagery and media that has occurred during the past fifty years. Does Benjamin’s famous essay still speak to this new situation? That is the question posed by the editors of this book to a wide range of leading scholars and thinkers across a spectrum of disciplines in the humanities. The essays gathered here do not hazard a univocal reply to that question; rather they offer a rich, wide-ranging critique of Benjamin’s position that refracts and reflects contemporary thinking about the ethical, political, and aesthetic implications of life in the digital age.
