Susan Derwin - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Susan Derwin

The German Quarterly, 1986

A historico-philosophical essay on the forms of great epic literature. by Georg. He was looking f... more A historico-philosophical essay on the forms of great epic literature. by Georg. He was looking for a general dialectic of literary genres that was based upon the The Theory of the Novel in his polemic against the

American Literature, 1989

Speaking about Torture, 2020

Guilt, 2022

War is, in the words of Vietnam veteran Karl Marlantes, a “moral quagmire,” born of the ethical, ... more War is, in the words of Vietnam veteran Karl Marlantes, a “moral quagmire,” born of the ethical, emotional, and existential consequences of inflicting death upon the enemy. This essay analyzes the challenges veterans face when confronting their feelings of guilt about wartime killing. It explores how veterans must balance the antithetical experiences of, on the one hand, having been a warrior, charged with casting aside the prohibition against killing, and, on the other hand, returning to society after war, where that prohibition obtains. The essay argues that, in order for warriors to successfully heal from war, their guilt must be avowedly co-owned by both themselves and their society. If and when this happens, guilt can become socially productive, and warriors can regain access to, and assume the full range of, their humanity, not least their sense of belonging to the society in whose name they served.

KulturPoetik, 2020

In diesem Artikel werden die psychologischen Auswirkungen des Krieges auf Militärangehörige unter... more In diesem Artikel werden die psychologischen Auswirkungen des Krieges auf Militärangehörige untersucht, die während des von den USA angeführten »Krieges gegen den Terror« im Irak und in Afghanistan stationiert waren. Ausgehend von einer Kritik an der gängigen Beschreibung durch den Begriff ›Posttraumatische Belastungsstörung‹ und einer Diskussion über »moralische Verletzungen«, der wichtigsten psychologischen Wunde der jüngsten asymmetrischen Kriege, wird sowohl die Ätiologie als auch die Behandlung der Verletzung rekonstruiert. ›Moral injury‹ wird als Symptom für die wachsende Trennung zwischen US-Militär-und Zivilkultur mit ihrer ambivalenten Haltung gegenüber Veteranen verstanden. Für eine erfolgreiche Wiedereingliederung der Kämpfer und Kämpferinnen ist es von zentraler Bedeutung, dass die Zivilgesellschaft sich aktiv auch mit ihrer schuldhaften Rolle in diesen Kriegen auseinandersetzt. Damit verbleibt die Schuld nicht allein bei den Veteranen, sondern wird gemeinsam getragen. Between 2015 and 2016, the number of veterans of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who died by suicide rose 10 %, according to the most recent findings of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. 1 The report indicates that, while the overall rate of deaths by suicide per day in the veteran popular has not increased since 2015, among veterans between the ages of 18 and 34, the rate has risen from 40 per 100,000 veterans in 2015 to 45 per 100,000 veterans in 2016. In the words of AMVETS (American Veterans) National Executive Director Joe Chenelly, »This isn't just alarming. It's a national emergency that requires immediate action. We've spent the last decade trying to improve the transitioning process for our veterans, but we're clearly failing, and people are dying«. 2

Speaking about Torture, 2012

Choice Reviews Online, 2012

Cover design by Greg Betza vii 1. In Auschwitz, Améry worked as a clerk in the I.G. Farben factor... more Cover design by Greg Betza vii 1. In Auschwitz, Améry worked as a clerk in the I.G. Farben factory. As the Soviets approached, he was evacuated, first to Buchenwald and then to Bergen-Belsen. After liberation, he worked as a journalist and eventually began writing works of philosophy and literature. In 1976 he published an exploration of suicide, and two years later, he took his own life by overdosing on sleeping pills. "

Traumatic Memories of the Second World War and After, 2016

There is a growing awareness that the diagnosis and treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (... more There is a growing awareness that the diagnosis and treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in military service members has not been an effective means of dealing with the psychological trauma of war. Mental health professionals who treat soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have perceived a disparity between soldiers’ psychological responses to combat and the officially identified cause of PTSD), which is fear. William Nash, who in 2004 served in Iraq as a combat psychiatrist, notes that after the Battle of Fallujah, not fear, but “survivor’s guilt, moral injury, [and] feeling betrayed by leaders” were the predominant reactions among soldiers.1

Style, Sep 22, 2003

M. F. K. Fisher once said, "I do not consider myself a food writer" (qtd. in Lopate 545... more M. F. K. Fisher once said, "I do not consider myself a food writer" (qtd. in Lopate 545). Notwithstanding her view, she remains known for her copious body of writing on gastronomy and her English translation of Brillat-Savarin's famous 1825 treatise on eating, The Physiology of Taste, though she also wrote poetry, novels, a screenplay, essays, and stories, all on topics other than food. How do we reconcile Fisher's self-perception with her reputation? Phillip Lopate suggests that we consider food to be Fisher's defining metaphor. He writes, "Certainly food was her primary subject matter, and her achievement was to use this seemingly mundane concern as a metaphor for the analysis of human appetite, disappointment, and rapture" (545). According to Lopate, Fisher's knowledge of food and her interest in it served as the medium through which she expressed a wider scope of thought. In what follows I will suggest that Fisher's power to transform food into a metaphoric language came from what she knew about her own hunger and what she believed to be true of hunger in general: that it was its own kind of metaphor; that it was the expression of desires that no food could ever satisfy In an interview Fisher commented, "One has to live, you know. You can't just die from grief or anything. You don't die. You might as well eat well, have a good glass of wine, a good tomato" (qtd. in Lopate 545). This remark seems to imply that, for Fisher, food was part of life that remained in face of loss. Fisher herself was on intimate terms with loss, having survived the deaths of her second husband, Dwillyn Parish, and, shortly thereafter, her brother, David. About these losses she said, "Death left me crippled. Timmy's death preceded David's death by several months. Part of me didn't survive it" (qtd. in Lazar 530). These were life-defining losses, but they were not all-consuming. Fisher could not "die from grief or anything." She faced grief, and when she did, food lined up with all other facets of her continued existence. It was a concern, no more or less weighty than any other. At the same time, it was part of a greater impulse to lire that held steady in her, even when she was confronted with devastating loss. Decades after the deaths of her husband and brother, Fisher's vital impulse was evident in one of her lifelong practices and pleasures: room arrangement. Jeannette Ferrary describes how the eighty-year-old Fisher used to move furniture around: "In small ways she was always rearranging just about everything in the house [...]. Once her mobility started to become curtailed, she could no longer pick up everything and move on or plan an impromptu trip to Aix" (205). Moving furniture, not just physically but also mentally, was something Fisher wrote about in 1933: "I shift everything in a room, as some people strip the clothes from a desirable body, without moving more than the eyeballs," she stated (Stay 14). The comparison Fisher draws between moving furniture and undressing a body reveals what grief could not extinguish: her desire. Fisher might have felt her survival threatened by the loss of two people whom she dearly loved--"part of me didn't survive"--but she did not disparage the desire that remained. She survived because she desired; she desired, so she ate. Eating sensibly was a sign of life as measured by her desire. And because she respected both life and desire, she upheld that "you might as well eat well, have a good glass of wine, a good tomato." The desire manifest in Fisher's imaginary rearranging of rooms "without moving more than the eyeballs" brings to mind another mental activity, namely reading. Like Fisher's mental regrouping of furniture, reading is an activity of interpretation that consists of recognizing the connections between the elements of a text, of seeing their interrelationships. It is noteworthy that Fisher gave the final place she lived the same name as the final text she worked on: Last House. …

The Yearbook of English Studies, 1995

... Susan Derwin's critical object in The Ambivalence of Form: Lukács, Freud and the Novel i... more ... Susan Derwin's critical object in The Ambivalence of Form: Lukács, Freud and the Novel is realism, and her achievement is to have linked novelistic ... positions in Balzac's La Recherche de l'Absolu, and with the irony of female self-staging in Fontane's Frau Jenny Treibel, long a ...

SubStance, 1996

"Derwin's 'Ambivalence of Form' is an important book illustrating in a compellin... more "Derwin's 'Ambivalence of Form' is an important book illustrating in a compelling way the stakes of the continuing debates on representation and the modern subject."--Ewa Ziarek, 'Comparative Literature Studies. By bringing together the work of Lukacs and Freud, Susan Derwin reveals how the creation of subjectivity is a common concern of both aesthetics and psychoanalysis.

Nineteenth-Century Literature, 1993

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn begins with a notice cautioning against readings that attempt to f... more Adventures of Huckleberry Finn begins with a notice cautioning against readings that attempt to find motive, moral, or meaning in the narrative, in short, with a proscription that contest the grounds of reading itself. Such a command is only intelligible in light of the relation elaborated in the text between, on the one hand, conscience or mortality, and on the other hand, cognition, as embodied by the formal requirements of plot. The novel suggests that the strictures of morality are as necessary to human identity as plot structure is to narrative. Moreover, both morality and plot are indebted to a process of narcissistic projection that produces meaning by generating distorting images of self and other. Morality is an ambivalent force, both aggressive and constitutive in its effects, while plot, in its capacity to control the disclosure of information, is manipulative and strategically exclusionary. The structure of Huckleberry Finn observes the requirements of plot, but Twain's complex use of irony complicates the novel's formal linearity and affords a critical perspective on the process of narcissistic projection underwriting both plot and mortality.

Monatshefte, 2010

Andreas Stuhlmann discusses Fichte’s essay and radio feature on August von Platen. Fichte conside... more Andreas Stuhlmann discusses Fichte’s essay and radio feature on August von Platen. Fichte considers Platen a precursor of modernism in poetry and a forerunner of liberated gay sensibility and natural sensuality. In Fichte’s view, Platen’s experience of impossible, destructive great love is shared by all homosexuals. Fichte sees himself as Platen’s literary double and intertwines his own autobiography with that of the count. Mario Fuhse writes about the diffi culty of constructing Fichte’s biography from his texts because he repeats varying versions of his memories. Fuhse sees “memory mapping” in the overall structure of Fichte’s Die Geschichte der Empfi ndlichkeit where the text conglomerate does not follow conventional order moving from left to right and top to bottom. Instead it ‘reads’ like a map or photo. Fuhse focuses on Der Platz der Gehängten which Fichte labeled a novel but which has the style of lyric poetry and contains passages reminiscent of Japanese Haiku. Fuhse approaches Fichte’s text as a mathematical system refl ecting the triangular design of Moroccan marketplaces and Suras in the Koran. Like Trzaskalik, Fuhse sees in Fichte’s writing a tribute to Mallarmé’s failed poetic vision of a book that would encompass the world. Brigitte Weingart looks at Fichte’s gossip novel Die zweite Schuld where the main topic is the 1963 Berlin Literary Colloquium in which Fichte participated. Fichte makes the gossip circulated there the object of ethnological analysis. He observes rituals, struggles for power and prominence, offi cial pronouncements, and behindthescenes gossip. Weingart points out that the title of the novel refers to Giordano’s essays on the inability of Germans to mourn, their inability to come to terms with their past and deal with the Holocaust. She mentions the undertone of antiSemitism and homophobia in German literary circles at the time Fichte was writing. In discussing Fichte’s approach to gossip, she asks about the effect of Fichte himself on the social phenomenon he is observing and also about what happens when the oral medium of gossip is transformed into a written text. Weingart agrees with Gillett on Fichte’s use of what he considers “good” gossip as a strategy of resistance. The fi nal contribution to the volume is Roland Spahr’s harsh critique of the editing of Die Geschichte der Empfi ndlichkeit. Spahr is the Lektor at S. Fischer Verlag who oversees Hubert Fichte’s works. He gives an insider’s account of the confl icts and struggles of various editors to deal with the texts and with each other. Editor Robert Gillett’s comments in his foreword that though the essays in this volume are devoted to marginal research topics, nonetheless “der ‘ganze Fichte’ ” (8) is represented. Indeed, the essays proceed from marginal topics to cuttingedge themes at the heart of Fichte’s life and works. This volume belongs in all library collections of German literature.

MLN, 1987

Although effector CD4 + T cells readily respond to antigen outside the vasculature, how they resp... more Although effector CD4 + T cells readily respond to antigen outside the vasculature, how they respond to intravascular antigens is unknown. Here we show the process of intravascular antigen recognition using intravital multiphoton microscopy of glomeruli. CD4 + T cells undergo intravascular migration within uninflamed glomeruli. Similarly, while MHCII is not expressed by intrinsic glomerular cells, intravascular MHCII-expressing immune cells patrol glomerular capillaries, interacting with CD4 + T cells. Following intravascular deposition of antigen in glomeruli, effector CD4 + T-cell responses, including NFAT1 nuclear translocation and decreased migration, are consistent with antigen recognition. Of the MHCII + immune cells adherent in glomerular capillaries, only monocytes are retained for prolonged durations. These cells can also induce T-cell proliferation in vitro. Moreover, monocyte depletion reduces CD4 + T-cell-dependent glomerular inflammation. These findings indicate that MHCII + monocytes patrolling the glomerular microvasculature can present intravascular antigen to CD4 + T cells within glomerular capillaries, leading to antigen-dependent inflammation.

MLN, 1993

... When in 1920 Freud called this instinct sadism, as Laplanche has pointed out, he used a misno... more ... When in 1920 Freud called this instinct sadism, as Laplanche has pointed out, he used a misnomer, because, sadism already implies a sexu-alized aggression ... Like the coinage of the concept sadomasochism by Krafft-Ebing, Freud's 1919 essay on masochism is grounded ...

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 1994

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 1996

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 1993