Susan Derwin

What Surviving Auschwitz Reveals About Inhumanity Today
 
Sunday, August 5
11 a.m.

      Primo Levi was 23 when he was captured and deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he spent almost a year. After his release, Levi devoted his life to writing about the dehumanization he had undergone and witnessed as a prisoner. His body of work serves as a primary point of reference for contemporary understandings of the potential for inhumanity within societies and individuals. Prof. Susan Derwin will discuss Levi's analysis of the immediate and enduring impact of persecution and how that analysis provides a way to think about contemporary suffering.

      Derwin teaches German and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she was chair of the Comparative Literature Program for eight years. She earned her B.A. at Cornell University and her Ph.D. at The Johns Hopkins University. Her research and teaching interests include 19th- and 20th- century prose narratives, with an emphasis on literary memoir, and Holocaust studies. Among her publications are The Ambivalence of Form: Lukács, Freud and the Novel, essays on M.F.K. Fisher, and on contemporary film. She is presently completing a book on representations of Holocaust survival in film and literature.

$6, or free for Friends of the Center.

PURCHASE TICKETS ONLINE

Friends of the Center may opt to reserve tickets by calling (323) 666-9797, ext. 102, or emailing info@cfiwest.org.

The Center for Inquiry-West
4773 Hollywood Blvd.
Hollywood, CA 90027
2 blocks west of Vermont at Berendo
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