Intro
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Spinoza and the Simultaneity of Promise and Disappointment
Chapter 1: Spinoza and F. H. Jacobi's Idealist Disavowal of Disappointment or How Romanticism Questions Idealizations of the Anthropocene
Chapter 2: Rendering Dialectics Disappointing: Spinoza's Specter Haunting the Anthropocene from Romanticism to Postmodernism in Literature and Science
Chapter 3: The Destructive Element: Keats and Conrad or How Romanticism Avows Idealism's Disavowed Disappointment

Chapter 4: Modernity's Promise and Its Disavowed Disappointment: Hannah Arendt's Analysis of Totalitarianism Out of the Sources of Conrad's Heart of Darkness
Chapter 5: The Trajectory of Conrad's Novel of Disavowed Disappointment: Hegel's Dialectics, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Saul Bellow's Ravelstein
Chapter 6: Political Promises and History's Disappointments: Leo Strauss as the Esoteric Center ofBellow's Ravelstein and the Critique ofGrand Political Promises

Chapter 7: Disappointment in the Age of the Anthropocene: How D. H. Lawrence and Kafka Render Dialectics Inoperative
Chapter 8: Disappointing Expectations of Redemption: Modern Jewish Writing and Thought
Chapter 9: Conclusion: Expecting Disappointment, or, from Pynchon's, Roth's, Strauss's, and Vonnegut's Postmodernism to Anna Burns's Milkman and D. F. Wallace's The Pale King
Bibliography
Index.