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 (openhumanitiespress.org/feedback). Professor Sussman is currently Visiting Professor of German at Rutgers University, USA.

A highly relatable book for many across the humanities

1. November 18, 2020. Postal.2. October 6, 2020. Apocalypse red, apocalypse blue.3. December 12, 2020. Confederacy of zombies.4. October 18, 2019. Protests, curtailment of bus service, Queens.5. June 7, 2020. Atlas of vanished places.6. February 10, 2021. Requiem to disinterest.7. January 27, 2020. New feudal lords.8. Thanksgiving, 2021. Partisans of writing: Mayer with Derrida9. April 1, 2018. Welcome to the Great Dismissal!10. August 15, 2020. Co-lateral dommages.11. December, 31, 2020. What on earth to do with the bodies?12. August 30, 2018. Midterm enigmas for progressives.13. December 15, 2021. Partisans of writing. Tobin Smith.14. January 19, 2021. Politics of entertainment15. May 24, 2020. Sikhs and other cabbies.16. November 15, 2020. Electronic ticks and leaden bubbles.17. June 13, 2019. Three deer in a development near Harrisburg, PA.18. Labor Day, 2021. Partisans of writing. Shoshanah Zuboff.19. March 15, 2022. Partisans of writing. Adam Serwer.20. February 14, 2022. University of the street.21. May 15, 2022. This Thing that dwells within us.22. June 27, 2022. Dismissal day: The strange loop of identity politics.23. January 23, 2023. I was there.

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.