Overview

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 historicist 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 closed future and ever-available past (a past we have not managed to leave behind) converge to produce an ever-broadening present of simultaneities. This profound change to a key dimension of our existence has complex consequences for the way in which we think about ourselves and our relation to the material world. At the same time, the ubiquity of digital media has eliminated our tactile sense of physical space, altering our perception of our world. Gumbrecht draws on his mastery of the philosophy of language to enrich his everyday observations, traveling to Disneyland, a small town in Louisiana, and the center of Vienna to produce striking sketches of our broad presence in the world.

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9781322541334

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Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the most imaginative and innovative critic to have emerged from the German philological tradition since the great generation of Auerbach and Spitzer. His brilliant books have expanded our concept of critical inquiry. Theoretical virtuosity, staggering breadth of learning, and sustained engagement with the texture and aliveness of cultural artifacts and practices characterize his work throughout. But Gumbrecht's intellectual signature is recognizable above all in two features: keen diagnostic sensitivity and the courage of unprotected, first-personal judgment. Both are amply in evidence in Our Broad Present. --David Wellbery, University of Chicago

Author Information

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is a German-born American literary theorist and the Albert Gu?rard Professor of Literature at Stanford University. He teaches at the Universit? de Montr?al, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), and the Coll?ge de France. He is the author of Production of Presence, What Meaning Cannot Convey, Living at the Edge of Time, and Making Sense in Life and Literature.

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