Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem | National Humanities Center

Work of the Fellows: Monographs

Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem

By Jennifer L. Fleissner (NHC Fellow, 2011–12)

Book Cover of Maladies of the Will

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022

From the publisher’s description:

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.

Subjects
Literature / Literary Criticism / American Literature / Novels / Modernity / Free Will / United States of America /

Fleissner, Jennifer L. (NHC Fellow, 2011–12). Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022.