Maladies of the Will
The American Novel and the Modernity Problem
9780226822020
9780226822013
9780226822037
Maladies of the Will
The American Novel and the Modernity Problem
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.
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.
504 pages | 6 x 9 | © 2022
Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature, General Criticism and Critical Theory
Reviews
Table of Contents
Preface
The Book’s Organization
Chapter Descriptions
Introduction: The Novel and the Will
Literary-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 Will
The Strange Problem of Too Much Interiority
The “Awfully Expanded World”: Seventeenth-Century Selfhood and Its Precursors
The Eighteenth Century Tames the Self
The Return of the Wilderness Within, from the Gothic to Kant
Law and Freedom in The Scarlet Letter
2 Vitalizing the Bildungsroman
The Bildungsroman as a Body’s Story
The Birth of Medical Vitalism: The Body as Wayward Will
Vitalist Legacies, I: Sensibility, Romanticism, and the Birth of Psychology
The Morgesons as Vitalist Bildungsroman
The Reflex and the Return to Mechanism
Vitalist Legacies, II: The Alternative Neovitalisms of Goldstein and Canguilhem
3 General Willfulness: Moby-Dick and Romantic Sovereignty
Modernity’s Two Wills
Ahab, or Anatomizing the Romantic Will (Hegel, Fichte, Lukács)
Ishmael and Intensity (Spinoza, Schopenhauer)
The General Will (Rousseau, Arendt)
Coda: Pip’s Dissent
4 The James Brothers at Century’s End: Mysticism, Abstraction, and the Forms of Social Life
William and the Will
Four Visions of Sociality: Intermingling, Fusion, Intersubjectivity, Form
William and the Sick Soul
The Social Phantasmagoria of The Ambassadors
5 “Begin All Over Again”: Naturalism, Habit, and the Embodiment of the Will
Evolutionary Economics and the Moral Danger of Doing Nothing
The Brute’s Two Faces: Frank Norris’s Vandover
Subjects of Interest and Habit in Contemporary Theory: Sedgwick, Berlant, Foucault
Nietzsche’s Return to Vitalism
Coda: Humanization Run Wild
6 Narrative and Its Discontents: Racial Justice, Existential Action, and the Problem of the Past
The “Racial Politics of Temporality,” Then and Now (Hopkins and Dunbar)
The Realist Insistence: Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition
A Certain Distance: The Uncanny Everyday (Spillers and Freud)
Du Bois and the Moment of Hesitation
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
The Book’s Organization
Chapter Descriptions
Introduction: The Novel and the Will
Literary-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 Will
The Strange Problem of Too Much Interiority
The “Awfully Expanded World”: Seventeenth-Century Selfhood and Its Precursors
The Eighteenth Century Tames the Self
The Return of the Wilderness Within, from the Gothic to Kant
Law and Freedom in The Scarlet Letter
2 Vitalizing the Bildungsroman
The Bildungsroman as a Body’s Story
The Birth of Medical Vitalism: The Body as Wayward Will
Vitalist Legacies, I: Sensibility, Romanticism, and the Birth of Psychology
The Morgesons as Vitalist Bildungsroman
The Reflex and the Return to Mechanism
Vitalist Legacies, II: The Alternative Neovitalisms of Goldstein and Canguilhem
3 General Willfulness: Moby-Dick and Romantic Sovereignty
Modernity’s Two Wills
Ahab, or Anatomizing the Romantic Will (Hegel, Fichte, Lukács)
Ishmael and Intensity (Spinoza, Schopenhauer)
The General Will (Rousseau, Arendt)
Coda: Pip’s Dissent
4 The James Brothers at Century’s End: Mysticism, Abstraction, and the Forms of Social Life
William and the Will
Four Visions of Sociality: Intermingling, Fusion, Intersubjectivity, Form
William and the Sick Soul
The Social Phantasmagoria of The Ambassadors
5 “Begin All Over Again”: Naturalism, Habit, and the Embodiment of the Will
Evolutionary Economics and the Moral Danger of Doing Nothing
The Brute’s Two Faces: Frank Norris’s Vandover
Subjects of Interest and Habit in Contemporary Theory: Sedgwick, Berlant, Foucault
Nietzsche’s Return to Vitalism
Coda: Humanization Run Wild
6 Narrative and Its Discontents: Racial Justice, Existential Action, and the Problem of the Past
The “Racial Politics of Temporality,” Then and Now (Hopkins and Dunbar)
The Realist Insistence: Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition
A Certain Distance: The Uncanny Everyday (Spillers and Freud)
Du Bois and the Moment of Hesitation
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index