Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is Albert Guérard Professor in Literature in the Departments of Comparative Literature, of French & Italian, of Spanish & Portuguese at Stanford University. 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

Find out about his publications
Find out about his person

Read two articles in the german Newspaper "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung":
1. "Nachhaltiges Lesen in natürlicher Umgebung", FAZ, 15 October 2008
2. "Eine schwere Geburt - Der bleierne Tag, die verhaltene Freude und der Glaube an das Charisma des neuen Präsidenten", FAS, 9 November 2008

Course Requirements

A research Paper of five pages