"Are there parallels between watching a baseball match and listening to a Beethoven symphony?" — asks Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. A literary and cultural theorist, philosopher, professor of Stanford University who is known for "the culture of presence" concept, Gumbrecht states that we can find aesthetic meaning in the most mundane experiences.
The collection of papers Disordered Time comprises articles, a column, and a speech by Gumbrecht, where the author shows how today, for the first time since the middle ages we feel alienated observers of events as we are surrounded by the "Complex Present".
The time has disordered and pushes from the two sides — with "blocked future" and "aggressively present past". In this situation we can comprehensively discuss utopian intentions to combine art and everyday life, the role of the observer in Kaspar David Fridrich's paintings, an amusement by watching sports, the election political campaigns, and Husserl phenomenology.
This book is the sixth collection of texts from the Small Run Books series and includes the following papers by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht:
1. Ethical Limits of Fascination? Why Sports Events Captivate Their Spectators. 2. The Crisis Comes. 3. Harmony and Rupture Under the Light of Caspar David Friedrich. 4. The Concept of Time in the Humanities Today. 5. Aesthetic Experience in Everyday Worlds: Reclaiming an Unredeemed Utopian Motif.