Thomas Pfau is the Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of English and a professor of German at Duke University, with a secondary appointment on the Duke Divinity School faculty. His many books include Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge and Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790–1840.
Death is experienced as the total absence of meaning and, consequently, as something not to be understood but merely to be managed by drawing on medical ingenuity, pharmaceutical resources, and the (increasingly limited) forbearance of insurance companies.