Romancing Spinoza

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, a novelist, biographer, and professor of philosophy, delivers the Franke Lecture in the Fall of 2012 on the influences of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza upon literature and the enlightenment. Goldstein challenges a cultural portrait of Spinoza as distant from aesthetic concerns, and meditates upon Spinoza’s imprint upon writers including Melville, Goethe, George Eliot, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Heine. Granted a prestigious “genius award” by the MacArthur Foundation, Goldstein is the author of several acclaimed philosophically-minded novels, has held multiple prestigious teaching appointments at universities including Columbia and Rutgers, and has written biographies of Kurt Godel and Spinoza.