The Great Dismissal: Memoir of the Cultural Demolition Derby, 2015-22

Description

Veteran scholar and critic Henry Sussman deploys anecdote, reportage, and memoir to lament and scrutinize the rise of anti-intellectualism in the past few decades. How are we to reckon with the decline of impartiality and sharp increase in self-interested interference in politic, legal, and cultural spheres; the normalization of pathological narcissism in public life; and the blanket dismissal of scientific findings and their counterparts in the humanities and social sciences? In retracing his own intellectual and experiential steps, Sussman revisits many of his lasting inspirations, including Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Immanuel Kant, and J. Hillis Miller. The result is an intellectual meditation on 'the great dismissal,' in public and political life, of venerable and vital humanistic traditions, ethics, and ways of thinking.

Henry Sussman retired in 2017 as Professor of Germanic Languages and Literature at Yale University, USA, after a 45-year teaching career. He is the author of 11 books, including Around the Book (2011), The Aesthetic Contract (2007), Psyche and Text: The Sublime and the Grandiose in Literature, Psychopathology and Culture (1993), and High Resolution: Critical Theory and the Problem of Literacy (1989). He has edited five volumes, including Acts of Narrative, co-edited with Carol Jacobs (2003). He is the founder and co-editor of the curated, theory-driven weblog, Feedback (www.openhumanitiespress.org/feedback). Professor Sussman is currently Visiting Professor of German at Rutgers University, USA.

This book establishes a new critical standard for memoir. The Great Dismissal demolishes efforts to expunge controversial books from our society simply because they induce people to think. Through an improvised mash-up of original poetry, trenchant cultural analysis, and touching memoir, Sussman's amazing book is an electroshock to the deadened brain of America. This kaleidoscopic survey of life during the Trump-COVID years from one of Derrida's most celebrated students is an extremely important and highly original work of social and political criticism. A must read for anyone who wants to make thinking great again! * Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Professor of English and Philosophy, University of Houston, Victoria, USA, and Executive Director of the Society for Critical Exchange * In The Great Dismissal, Henry Sussman crafts an extraordinary voice meticulously registering the existential vagaries of life in New York City during the twin plagues of COVID and Trump. This intimately personal, nonlinear chronicle foregrounds contemporary journalism that challenges the mendacity, hypocrisy, and subterfuge of American political culture. The Great Dismissal is a sustained meditation on intellectual redemptions that refuse to be dismissed by the Pharisees of disinformation. * Bruce Clarke, Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor of Literature and Science, Texas Tech University, USA * No one today writes - or thinks - quite like Henry Sussman. A rhizomatic memoir of the Trump era, The Great Dismissal reads as a critique of the present penned simultaneously from the future and past. Pulling from Piketty and Poe and conversations in the street with equal attentiveness, Sussman offers a vibrant, searing, subjective answer to the still critical questions: What is to be done, and Who is to blame? The passion of the prose itself models an alternative - an irrational but inexhaustible, perennial hope - to the post-apocalyptic global present he so skillfully scalpels apart. * Marijeta Bozovic, Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Yale University, USA *