Maladies of the Will

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 notion of the autonomous subject, able to chart a path toward self-determination. Yet novelists have often 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 these maladies of the will 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, one 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, both the will’s grandeur and its perversity emerge as it alternately aligns itself with and pits itself against a bigger Will—whether that of God, the state, society, history, or life itself.  At a time when invocations of autonomy appear alongside the medicalization of many behaviors, and when democracy’s tenet of popular will has come into doubt, Maladies of the Will provides a road map to how we got here, and how we might think these vital dilemmas anew.

“"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 Gy”

“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
"My mounting impatience with therapeutic readings of Moby-Dick, in which Ahab is the disease and various remedies (love, beauty, environmentalism, community, democracy) are proposed for treatment, made me particularly receptive to Fleissner's Maladies of the Will. . . .  'Therapeutic readings,' Fleissner argues, 'frequently ignore. . . what seemed powerful about Ahab’s quest not only to Ishmael, and not only to the crew, but, indeed, to Melville himself, who persistently gives his captain the "bold and nervous lofty language" he had learned from Shakespeare, which renders him "a mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies."' Not that Ahab isn’t appalling and even, at times, criminal. . . . But do we really want our works of the imagination to mirror our own best selves, responsible and even-tempered, doing our small part to make the world a better place?. . . . Wouldn’t we prefer Moby-Dick exactly as it is, with its violence paired with its pathos, and its baffled wonderment at the workings of the universe?" New York Review of Books
"In this ambitious study, [Fleissner] offers a new interpretation of the novel and its evolving form . . . Recommended." Choice
"Fleissner’s book admirably hones the dull, old humanist-religious concept of the will into a scalpel for dissecting the messy substance of subjectivity; as such, it provides an indispensable resource for rediscovering and addressing the unfinished business of the wayward US self." American Literary History
"With staggering erudition, Fleissner whisks the reader from Augustine to Arendt, Spinoza to Spillers, with stops along the way in eighteenth-century embryology, nineteenth-century psychiatry, and twentieth-century economics. Maladies of the Will offers a crucial corrective to the status quo, demonstrating that the most sophisticated theories of the internal divisions and inconsistencies characteristic of subjectivity have come from inside the 'liberal subject' itself." Nineteenth-Century Literature
"Maladies of the Will is at once an intellectual history, a new history of the novel, and a much-needed intervention. . . . [It] is not just an intervention for scholars of the nineteenth-century American novel; rather, it provides a revitalized vocabulary for questions of modernity and subjectivity for the wider field of literary studies." Studies in the Novel

Jennifer L. Fleissner is associate professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington, where she is also affiliated with the Department of Gender Studies. She is the author of Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

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