Binding: Paperback
Description: 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.
Title: Maladies Of The Will The American Novel And The Modernity Problem
Author(s): Fleissner Jennifer L.
Publisher: The University Of Chicago Press
Barcode: 9780226822020
Pages: 512 Pages
Publication Date: 12/16/2022
Category: Education