Disappointment: Its Modern Roots from Spinoza to Contemporary Literature

Considering the support behind Brexit and Donald Trump’s ‘America first’ policies, this book challenges the idea that they are motivated solely by fear and instead looks at the hope and promises that drive these renewed forms of nationalism. Addressing these neglected motivations within contemporary populism, Michael Mack explores how our current sense of disappointment with our ecological, economic and political state of affairs partakes of a history of failed promises that goes back to the inception of modernity; namely, to Spinoza’s radical enlightenment of diversity and equality. Through this innovative approach, Spinoza emerges less as a single isolated figure and more as a sign for an intellectual constellation of thinkers and writers who – from the romantics to contemporary theory and literature – have introduced various shifts in the way we see humanity as being limited and prone to disappointment. Combining intellectual history with literary and scientific theory, the book traces the collapse of traditional values and orders from Spinoza to Nietzsche and then to the literary modernism of Joseph Conrad and postmodernism of Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. Spinoza and F. H. Jacobi’s idealist disavowal of disappointment or how Romanticism questions Idealisations of the Anthropocene 2. Rendering Dialectics Disappointing: Spinoza’s spectre haunting the Anthropocene from Romanticism to Postmodernism in literature and science 3. The Destructive element: Keats & Conrad or How Romanticism avows idealism’s disavowed disappointment 4. Modernity’s promise and its disavowed disappointment: Hannah Arendt’s Analysis of Totalitarianism out of the Sources of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness 5. The trajectory of Conrad’s novel of Disavowed Disappointment: Hegel’s dialectics, Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein 6. Political Promises and History’s Disappointments: Leo Strauss as the esoteric centre of Bellow’s Ravelstein and the critique of grand political promises 7. Disappointment in the age of the Anthropocene: how D H Lawrence and Kafka render dialectics inoperative 8. Disappointing expectations of Redemption: Modern Jewish Writing and Thought 9. Conclusion: Expecting Disappointment, or, from Pynchon’s Roth’s, Strauss’s and Vonnegut’s postmodernism to Anna Burn’s Milkman and D. F. Wallace The Pale King Bibliography Acknowledgments Index

About the Author :
Michael Mack is Reader in English Literature at Durham University, UK. Formerly he has been a Visiting Professor at Syracuse University, a Fellow at the University of Sydney, and lecturer and research fellow at the University of Chicago. He is the author of six books, including How Literature Changes the Way We Think (Bloomsbury, 2012), Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity (Bloomsbury, 2010), and German Idealism and the Jew (2003), which was shortlisted for The Koret Jewish Book Award 2004. He is the editor of the Palgrave Companion to Literature and Philosophy (2018).

Review :
A masterful weave of intellectual history and literary criticism, Disappointment is magisterial in scope and in the depth and originality of its analysis of the ambiguous fortunes of the modern project. In an age of constant disappointments, in health care, political leadership, interpersonal relationships (at least virtual ones), Michael Mack strikes an engaging and readable note in examining what philosophers, writers, and thinkers have imagined disappointment to be over millennia. His view is that our modern sense of being disappointed with the world is a reflex of the Enlightenment notion of the self and its options. That may well mean that our 21st century worldview rests in the very notion of the failure of those claims. Disappointment is reality of the clash between our need for improvement and our ever compromised and compromising life experience. Read it, you won’t be disappointed. Mack’s focus on the current sense of disappointment with our ecological, economic, and political state of affairs is most timely. This provocative, rigorous study blends disciplinary boundaries to open space for an exciting investigation of Spinoza’s modernity and how it shaped romantic, modernist, and post-modern writing and thought.