Body, Media, and Sports:

A Reading of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and David Foster Wallace

Abstract

This paper proposes to investigate the contemporary aesthetic experience related to sports in the works “In Praise of Athletic Beauty”, by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, and “Federer as religious experience”, by David Foster Wallace. One year apart from each other, both pose similar questions on the nature of that experience. The body is of great importance not only from the sportsperson's perspective but also from the perspective of the sports watcher. In relation to this, the analysis of these texts will be articulated with the reflection that both authors make upon mass media and the modifications brought by it with regard to the perception of temporality and spaciality. One of the most original ideas by Gumbrecht concerns about the dimension of presence, which has become more and more forgotten with the valuation of technology. In his book “Our Broad Present”, Gumbrecht discusses the temporal and historical contemporary perception as something capable of giving us the impression that we are all inserted in a continuous eternity. Foster Wallace was a consumer and a critic of USA's entertainment, and also a tennis player as a young man and one of the greatest American contemporary writers. In his essay on Swiss tennis player Roger Federer, he constantly reminds the reader the drastic difference between watching a match on television and watching it live. In which sense these analysis about sports are entwined with an important epochal diagnosis on aesthetic experience?