Spinoza vinden in de literatuur - #spinoza

Een enkele keer kom je een werk tegen dat studie maakt van hoe Spinoza voorkomt in literatuur. Ik wijs op dit boek, waarvan de paperback vorige maand verscheen

Patrick McGee, Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination: Spinoza, Blake, Hugo, Joyce. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2016 - 272 pagina's – books.google – vorige maand, 22-03-2018, verscheen de paperback [cf. de site van de auteur]

Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination explores the democratic thought of Spinoza and its relation to the thought of William Blake, Victor Hugo, and James Joyce. As a group, these visionaries articulate: a concept of power founded not on strength or might but on social cooperation; a principle of equality based not on the identity of individuals with one another but on the difference between any individual and the intellectual power of society as a whole; an understanding of thought as a process that operates between rather than within individuals; and a theory of infinite truth, something individuals only partially glimpse from their particular cultural situations. For Blake, God is the constellation of individual human beings, whose collective imagination produces revolutionary change. In Hugo's novel, Jean Valjean learns that the greatest truth about humanity lies in the sewer or among the lowest forms of social existence. For Joyce, Leopold and Molly Bloom are everybody and nobody, singular beings whose creative power and truth is beyond categories and social hierarchies.

En  dan vooral: George Eliot & Spinoza [i.h.b. haar Middlemarch]

Lees voor een algemene impressie Robert McCrum over George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-2) de No 21 van “The 100 best novels” van The Guardian

Voorts wat Rebecca Goldstein over George Eliot zegt, geïnterviewd over de Five Best Philosophical Novels.

Ik wijs verder op een “A Case Study of Spinozistic Ideals in George Eliot’s Middlemarch” [DOC], waarvan de auteur me niet geheel duidelijk is: Elizabeth Belnap? Is dat dezelfde als de goth anne shirley die erop wijst via deze tweet? Ze geeft een keurige samenvatting van de roman met het accent op het Spinozisme erin.

Moira Gatens, "Freedom and Determinism in Middlemarch, or Dorothea, the Lunatic" [studie uit 2008, PDF]

Moira Gatens, Spinoza’s Hard Path to Freedom. Van Gorcum, 2011 [cf. blog van 22-12-2011]

Zachary J. Hardy, “A Constant Unfolding of Far-Resonate Action”: George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Spinoza, and the Ethics of Power. College of William & Mary Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 205, 2015 – 115 pp. [PDF]

Joe Hughes, « “The Impious Specter of Spinozism:” Spinoza in England 1738‐1854 » [PDF] [zie hierover dit blog van 22-01-2014]