Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

Albert Guérard Professor in Literature in the Departments of Comparative Literature, of French & Italian, of Spanish & Portuguese (by courtesy), and he is affiliated with German Studies, the Program in Modern Thought & Literature, and HPST
112 Pigott Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2010
Tel (650) 723-2904

[email protected]

Professor Gumbrecht is also Professeur Associé au Département de Littérature comparée at the Université de Montréal, Directeur d'études associé at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), Professeur attaché au Collège de France, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Background and Current Research

Medieval "literature" and culture; Spanish, French, German, and (to a lesser extent) Italian literatures since the Renaissance; Argentinian and Brazilian literatures in the 19th and 20th centuries; Aesthetics; History of Ideas, History of Scholarship

Current Projects

In Praise of Athletic Beauty. Departing from the hypothesis that it is aesthetic pleasure, and more specifically: the pleasure that we take from experiencing "epiphanies of form," which, week after week, brings millions of spectators to our stadiums and to the screen, I will try to develop a new aesthetics of sport. The forthcoming book (2004) will be introduced by a historical survey-and may be supplemented by an anthology of texts about the historical relationships between athletics and philosophical thought.
2. Post-World War II essay: a foundational moment in western intellectual history. At first glance (and this "first glance" has dominated historiography over the past half-century), the impression prevails that, from an intellectual point of view, the years after 1945 were much less incisive, much less of a "turn-around" than the years following World War I. There is, however, at least one intellectual "tone" (or "movement") that seems to be uniquely related to the post-1945 era: and this is a new life-form of existentialism as a new "style of life." A detailed description of this style of life, in its different national variations, will be the starting point for a historical reconstruction that will try to recover and re-evaluate the long-term influence (an "indirect" influence, perhaps) of the late 1940s on western intellectual history.
3. Program in "Literary and Philosophical Thinking". For several years, now, and in collaboration with a number of colleagues and graduate students from the Philosophy Department and from the Division of Literatures, Cultures, & Languages, we have been developing an undergraduate program that will try to bring together, in a systematic way, classical and contemporary readings from the western philosophical and literary traditions, and, at the same time, instructors and students from the Stanford Departments of Philosophy and of Literatures. It is our-realistic-hope that this program will be inaugurated in the Fall quarter of 2004/2005.

Education

1974: Venia Legendi (Habilitation) Allgemeine und Romanische Literaturwissenschaft Universität Konstanz
1972: Universita degli studi di Pavia
1971-1974: Universität Konstanz
1971: Ph.D. Universität Konstanz
1970-1971: Universität München
1969-1970: Universidad de Salamanca
1969: Universität Regensburg
1967-1969: Universität München
1967: Abitur, Siebold Gymnasium Würzberg
1966: Lyceé Henri IV, Paris
1958-1967: Siebold Gymnasium Würzberg

Current Courses

COMPLIT 101. Seminar on Literature and the Institution of Literary Study
FRENLIT/COMPLIT 220. Guillaume Apollinaire's Work and Life

Recent Courses

COMPLIT 199. Senior Seminar on Literary Theory
COMPLIT 290C. Gustave Flaubert: Epistemology and Poetics of the 19th Century
COMPLIT 116Q. Western Philosophy and its Blind Spot: The History of Sports
COMPLIT 296G. Robert Musil's Novel: The Man Without Qualities and The Tradition of Western Subject Philosophy

Selected Publications

Eine Geschichte der spanischen Literatur (Frankfurt, Suhrkamp-Verlag, 1990. Spanish translation forthcoming at Fondo de Cultura Mexicana, Mexico City 2004).
Making Sense in Life and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). Preface by Wlad Godzich.
Modernizaçao dos Sentidos (Sao Paulo, Brazil: 34 Letras, 1998).
In 1926. Living at the Edge of Time. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). (Portuguese translation entitled Em 1926. Vivendo no Limite do Tempo (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Record, 1999). German translation entitled 1926. Ein Jahr am Rand der Zeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001). Spanish translation forthcoming at Editorial Iberoamericana, Mexico City. Russian translation also forthcoming.
Corpo e forma. Letteratura, estetica, non-ermeneutica (Milan: Mimesis, 2001).
Vom Leben und Sterben der großen Romanisten. Carl Vossler, Ernst Robert Curtius, Leo Spitzer, Erich Auerbach, Werner Krauss (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2002).
The Powers of Philology. Dynamics of Textual Scholarship. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003). German translation entitled Die Macht der Philologie. Ueber einen verborgenen Impuls im wissenschaftlichen Umgang mit Texten (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003). Spanish translation forthcoming at Editorial Iberoamericana, Mexico City.
Production of Presence. What Meaning Cannot Convey. Forthcoming at Stanford University Press, 2004. Spanish translation forthcoming at: Editorial Iberoamericana, Mexico City. German translation entitled "Diesseits der Hermeneutik" forthcoming at: Suhrkamp Verlag 2004).

Edited Books

(with K.L. Pfeiffer) Materialities of Communication (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
(with M. Brownlee) Cultural Authority in Golden Age Spain (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
(with David Palumbo-Liu) Streams of Cultural Capital (Stanford: Stanford Literature Review, Spring/Fall 1993; book version at Stanford University Press, 1997).
(with F. Kittler/B. Siegert) Der Dichter als Kommandant. D'Annunzio erobert Fiume (Munich: Fink-Verlag, 1996).
(with Ted Leland, Rick Schavone, Jeffrey Schnapp) The Athlete's Body (Stanford: Stanford Humanities Review 6.2, 1998).
(with Michael Marrinan) Mapping Benjamin. The Work of Art in the Digital Age (Stanford: Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

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