Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review“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.” * Sianne Ngai, University of Chicago *
“Full of dazzling philosophical insight,
Maladies of the Will offers a striking new way to understand the American novel. Fleissner shows us how the novel is uniquely equipped to grapple with the irreducible strangeness of the human will. To evade the problem of the will––as some strands of current thought tend to do––is to miss what novels have uncovered about the dilemmas of agency that continue to define our lives. A tremendous achievement.” * Nancy A. Bentley, University of Pennsylvania *
“This long-awaited monograph is poised to transform literary studies and philosophy with a brilliant reexamination of two of these disciplines’ most cherished objects of study: the novel and the will. . . Combining astonishing foresight and erudition,
Maladies of the Will will revolutionize why we read that most modern of forms, the novel, and how we think of that most ancient of problems, the will.” * Critical Inquiry *
"In one of the most comprehensive and erudite Americanist contributions to the field of literature and philosophy in quite some time, Fleissner challenges many of the assumptions underwriting the currently regnant posthumanist paradigm. . . . The book should be required reading, not just for those still willing to defend the (ostensibly) lost cause of the willful human subject, but also (and especially) those for whom the so-called death of the subject cannot come fast enough." * Transatlantica *
"In this ambitious study, [Fleissner] offers a new interpretation of the novel and its evolving form . . . Recommended." * Choice *
Table of ContentsPreface
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
