Description: "A literary and intellectual history of the trope of disappointment and its political implications from the 17th century through today"--
Brief description: Michael Mack (PhD. Cambridge) is Reader in English Literature and Medical Humanities 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 Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity(Continuum, 2010), German Idealism and the Jew (University of Chicago Press, 2003), which was shortlisted for The Koret Jewish Book Award 2004, and Anthropology as Memory (Niemeyer, 2001, Conditio Judaica Series).
Review Quotes:
"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." --Paul Mendes-Flohr, Dorothy Grant Maclear Professor Emeritus of Modern Jewish History and Thought, University of Chicago, USA
"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." --Sander L. Gilman, author of Stand Up Straight! A History of Posture "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." --Elizabeth Millán Brusslan, Department of Philosophy, DePaul University, USA