Maladies of the Will

The American Novel and the Modernity Problem

Häftad, Engelska, 2022

AvJennifer L. Fleissner

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An examination of the nineteenth-century American novel that argues for a new genealogy of the concept of the will.What if the modern person were defined not by reason or sentiment, as Enlightenment thinkers hoped, but by will? Western modernity rests on the ideal of the autonomous subject, charting a path toward self-determination. Yet novelists have portrayed the will as prone to insufficiency or excess—from indecision to obsession, wild impulse to melancholic inertia. Jennifer Fleissner’s ambitious book shows how the novel’s attention to the will’s maladies enables an ongoing interrogation of modern premises from within.Maladies of the Will reveals the nineteenth-century American novel’s relation to a wide-ranging philosophical tradition, highly relevant to our own tumultuous present. In works from Moby-Dick and The Scarlet Letter to Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons and Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, the will’s grandeur and its perversity emerge as it alternately aligns itself with and pits itself against a bigger Will—whether of God, the state, society, history, or life itself. Today, when invocations of autonomy appear beside the medicalization of many behaviors, and democracy’s tenet of popular will has come into doubt, Maladies of the Will provides a map to how we got here, and how we might think these vital dilemmas anew.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2022-12-16
Mått152 x 229 x 28 mm
Vikt680 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor512
FörlagThe University of Chicago Press
ISBN9780226822020

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PrefaceThe Book’s OrganizationChapter DescriptionsIntroduction: The Novel and the WillLiterary-Critical (from Lionel Trilling to Zadie Smith)Historical (from Augustine to Romanticism)Theoretical (from Locke and Sentimentalism to Pragmatism and Affect—and an Alternative to Both)1 Before and After the Novel: Abyssal Modernity and the Interior Life of the WillThe Strange Problem of Too Much InteriorityThe “Awfully Expanded World”: Seventeenth-Century Selfhood and Its PrecursorsThe Eighteenth Century Tames the SelfThe Return of the Wilderness Within, from the Gothic to KantLaw and Freedom in The Scarlet Letter2 Vitalizing the BildungsromanThe Bildungsroman as a Body’s StoryThe Birth of Medical Vitalism: The Body as Wayward WillVitalist Legacies, I: Sensibility, Romanticism, and the Birth of PsychologyThe Morgesons as Vitalist BildungsromanThe Reflex and the Return to MechanismVitalist Legacies, II: The Alternative Neovitalisms of Goldstein and Canguilhem3 General Willfulness: Moby-Dick and Romantic SovereigntyModernity’s Two WillsAhab, or Anatomizing the Romantic Will (Hegel, Fichte, Lukács)Ishmael and Intensity (Spinoza, Schopenhauer)The General Will (Rousseau, Arendt)Coda: Pip’s Dissent4 The James Brothers at Century’s End: Mysticism, Abstraction, and the Forms of Social LifeWilliam and the WillFour Visions of Sociality: Intermingling, Fusion, Intersubjectivity, FormWilliam and the Sick SoulThe Social Phantasmagoria of The Ambassadors5 “Begin All Over Again”: Naturalism, Habit, and the Embodiment of the WillEvolutionary Economics and the Moral Danger of Doing NothingThe Brute’s Two Faces: Frank Norris’s VandoverSubjects of Interest and Habit in Contemporary Theory: Sedgwick, Berlant, FoucaultNietzsche’s Return to VitalismCoda: Humanization Run Wild6 Narrative and Its Discontents: Racial Justice, Existential Action, and the Problem of the PastThe “Racial Politics of Temporality,” Then and Now (Hopkins and Dunbar)The Realist Insistence: Chesnutt’s Marrow of TraditionA Certain Distance: The Uncanny Everyday (Spillers and Freud)Du Bois and the Moment of HesitationAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

“In this brilliant, utterly singular study of the will, the modern individual, and modernity itself as problems, Fleissner makes a stunning intervention in the history and theory of the novel. It is no exaggeration to say that Maladies of the Will is on par with the achievements of Ian Watt and György Lukács. But Fleissner’s ability to combine astonishing erudition with deft diagnoses of critical impasses in our present strikes me as unparalleled. This book marks nothing less than a historical turning point in how we will read literature.”