"The electronic condition makes communication a permanent state of existence. The new media ecology has displaced the written word from the center of public communication. The strategies for being in the world through engagement with the written word—central to Modernity—are giving way. Is the life that is emerging less individual?" asks Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht.
"The body isolates itself through its connection to multiple devices, even in the presence of other human beings, while becoming a node in an electronic network of meanings that pass through it, delocalized. The body serves as a more or less intermittent host for everyone’s thoughts. "The model of sociability that took shape in Romanticism—centered on an autonomous subject in search of its originality—is recast into a collective condition that brings the human closer to the animal," he adds.
On Thursday, May 19, 2016, four national and international scholars discussed the challenges posed by new forms of communication for writing and the individual.
Ph.D. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
Holder of the Albert Guérard Chair (in Literature and Philosophy) at Stanford University, United States. Regular visiting professor at the University of Lisbon and adjunct professor at the Collège de France in Paris.
He has received nine honorary doctorates in six countries. His areas of expertise include the culture of the Middle Ages, the 18th century, and the early 20th century.
In the 1980s, he was part of a generation of German intellectuals who began to systematically reflect on the functions of contemporary media.
He has published 34 books, translated into 15 languages, and more than 1,000 academic articles. Among his most important publications are: In 1926. Living at the Edge of Time (Harvard University Press, 1997); The Powers of Philology (University of Illinois Press, 2003); Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford University Press, 2004); In Praise of Athletic Beauty (Harvard University Press, 2006); and After 1945 (University of Chicago Press, 2013).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnKS7RUqxo4&ab_channel=FacultaddeComunicaci%C3%B3n-UniversidadORTUruguay
Dr. Perla Chinchilla Pawling
Researcher at the Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico. She holds a Ph.D. in History from the Universidad Iberoamericana and is a tenured professor in the Department of History at that university in Mexico.
His areas of expertise include research methods, historiography, and the theory of history. His area of expertise focuses on the role of discourse and sermons in the 17th and 18th centuries.
His recent publications include, among others, *Writings of Modernity: The Jesuits Between Rhetorical and Scientific Culture* (UI, Francisco Xavier Clavigero Library, 2008); and *Michel de Certeau: A Thinker of Difference* (UI, Francisco Xavier Clavigero Library, 2009).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrVdVpJg3IM&ab_channel=FacultaddeComunicaci%C3%B3n-UniversidadORTUruguay
Ilán Semo, B.A.
Researcher at the Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. His main areas of expertise are 20th-century historiography; intellectual history; and contemporary history. He is the editor-in-chief of the journal Fractal in Mexico.
His recent publications include *La labor del objeto. Borges y la crisis de la interpretación* (in *Beobachtung Zweiter Ordnung im Historischen Kontext. Niklas Luhmann in Amerika* [Wilhelm Fink, Paderborn, 2013]), and the edited collection of works by Norbert Lechner, co-edited with Francisco Valdés Ugalde and Paulina Gutiérrez (FLACSO, Mexico City, 2013).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZYJJoljKfs&ab_channel=FacultaddeComunicaci%C3%B3n-UniversidadORTUruguay
Ph.D. Aldo Mazzucchelli
Full Professor (Grade 5) of Latin American Literature at the University of the Republic. He holds a Ph.D. in Literature from Stanford University. Among his most recent publications is *La mejor de las fieras humanas*. Vida de Julio Herrera y Reissig (Taurus, 2010; 2nd ed., Punto de Lectura, 2011), which won the Bartolomé Hidalgo Prize for best historical essay in 2010; and Neptunian Times. On the Spiritual Atmosphere of Latin American fin-de-siècle (Journal of Hispanic Modernism, 2010).
He is a Category II researcher with the National Research System of the National Agency for Research and Innovation (ANII). He is one of the four contributors to *Interruptor*, an online cultural criticism publication that has been published weekly since 2012.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEsF85FH8TY&ab_channel=FacultaddeComunicaci%C3%B3n-UniversidadORTUruguay