Synopses & Reviews
Rage Is the Subtext charts the internal shifts of Holocaust survivors who tell their stories of suffering, loss, and endurance. Susan Derwin locates the healing effect of literary testimony in its capacity to represent the reactions of survivors to traumatic experience, while concealing other more unsettling responses from view. Beneath the explicit concerns of works by Primo Levi, Saul Friedländer, Binjamin Wilkomirski, Imre Kertész and Liliana Cavani, Derwin uncovers unspoken reserves of rage, which then become legible as formal properties of the text. Drawing upon the analytic writings of D. W. Winnicott, Jean Améry, and others, Derwin identifies the volatile affect encrypted in testimonial narrative with experiences of social abandonment. She argues that, after liberation, many survivors were beset by an irresolvable ambivalence: on one side, they bitterly blamed their communities for abandoning them during the Holocaust; on the other, they desperately needed reconciliation with those communities in order to heal. For this reason, bearing witness became a crucial activity that contained and metabolized the survivor's rage so that an engaged life could become possible.
Review
“Susan Derwin’s book has the potential to initiate a new debate in Holocaust studies that focuses on rage as a suppressed affect not only in the memoirs of survivors but also in critical discussions. Her focus on rage adds an important aspect to trauma studies, especially since the link between trauma and rage has been relegated to the margins of Holocaust studies and trauma studies more generally.” —Gabriele Schwab, Chancellor’s Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine
Review
“The book is difficult to put down. Susan Derwin has made an important contribution to psychoanalytic theory itself, and through her fine-grained textual analysis she encourages a rethinking of the long-term, cross-generational effects for Holocaust survivors. Rage Is the Subtext is a beautifully crafted book, one especially compelling because Derwin is so careful to relate the authors’ words to their personal biography.” —Jeffrey Prager, professor in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and senior faculty and co-dean at the New Center for Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles
About the Author
Susan Derwin is associate professor in the Department of Germanic, Slavic, and Semitic Studies and chair of the Program in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara.