in the form of a widely felt sense of inertia and a changed relationship to time: the argument is that from the vantage point of the postwar years, the future came to be viewed as a threat. While these are two of Gumbrecht's more detailed elaborations on temporal moods, Stimmung relates also to a broader concept of moods that can be triggered by aesthetic experiences to produce a sense of "presence." Gumbrecht elaborates this theme further in his works about the material component of literary study. Presence and materiality Through the concept of Stimmung, Gumbrecht has argued that certain cultural events and aesthetic experiences can become "present," or have a tangible effect on human senses, emotions, and bodies. This idea underlies Gumbrecht's writing about literary criticism and methods of interpretation, and also much of his other work on material forms of culture, communication, and understanding in the 20th and 21st centuries. Presence is a central concept to many of his books, including In 1926: Living on the Edge of Time (1998), Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (2003), The Powers of Philology: Dynamics of Textual Scholarship (2003), Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature (2012), After 1945: Latency as Origin of the Present (2013), and Our Broad Present: Time and Contemporary Culture (2014). Throughout his writing, Gumbrecht emphasizes the importance of material experience to consuming literature and art. In Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature (2012), Gumbrecht applies the concept of mood to the process of reading literary works. He argues that the function of literature is to "make present," and treats aesthetic experiences as concrete encounters that affect a reader or viewer's physical environment or body. By connecting presence to art, especially the art of literature, in his description of language as a material component of the world, Gumbrecht returns to his roots in the study of philology, moving beyond Deconstruction's concept of language. He writes, "'Reading for Stimmung''' always means paying attention to the textual dimension of the forms that envelop us and our bodies as a physical reality—something that can catalyze inner feelings without matters of representation necessarily being involved." Focusing on the atmosphere produced by a work of literature and experienced by the work's reader, he argues, is crucial to the intellectual practice of reading and analyzing literature. In a 2006 interview with Gumbrecht, Ulrik Ekman describes Gumbrecht's work on