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.
Table of Content
Acknowledgments
Tracking a Hypothesis
1. Presence in Language or Presence Achieved Against Language?
2. A Negative Anthropology of Globalization
3. Stagnation: Temporal, Intellectual, Heavenly
4. ‘Lost in Focused Intensity’: Spectator Sports and Strategies of Re-Enchantment
5. Steady Admiration in an Expanding Present: On Our New Relationship with Classics
6. Infinite Availability: About Hyper-Communication (and Old Age)
In the Broad Present
Notes
Index
About the author
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is a German-born American literary theorist and the Albert Guérard Professor of Literature at Stanford University. He teaches at the Université de Montréal, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), and the Collège de France. He is the author ofProduction of Presence,
What Meaning Cannot Convey,
Living at the Edge of Time, and
Making Sense in Life and Literature.
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