American Whim

Caleb Smith, author of Thoreau’s Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture, talks with Jennifer Fleissner, author of Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem, to explore the tension between individual agency and societal influence in American life.

Smith examines how Thoreau’s ideas on discipline and the avoidance of distraction serve as a counterpoint to the volatile whims of contemporary culture, suggesting a path toward focused living amid chaos. Meanwhile, Fleissner scrutinizes the complexities of willpower and moral agency in American novels, illustrating how characters grapple with modernity’s pull on their desires and decisions. Together, these works illuminate the struggle between the seduction of immediate gratification and the pursuit of a more deliberate, meaningful existence, revealing that the American spirit is often a dance between whim and will.

Smith and Fleissner offer distinct perspectives on modernity, shaped by their focus on discipline and willpower, respectively. One critiques modernity through the lens of distraction, the other examines modernity’s impact on individual agency as depicted in novels. While Smith advocates for a return to discipline to navigate modern distractions, Fleissner reflects on the internal conflicts that arise when individuals confront the demands of modernity on their sense of self and agency. Together, they offer a framework to analyze how individuals might better engage with modern life and its inherent challenges.

Caleb Smith is professor of English at Yale University. He is the author of The Prison and the American Imagination, The Oracle and the Curse, and Thoreau’s Axe. He also authenticated and edited Austin Reed’s Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict. Smith has written about media, politics, and the arts for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, n+1, and other venues.

Jennifer Fleissner is professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism and Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem

, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

“Anxieties over attention and distraction are nothing new but also, and more to the point, [Smith] raises an enduring cultural contradiction: like Thoreau, many of us feel distracted by shifts and accelerations in collective life—by new media, to be sure, but also by capitalism and its myriad crises—and yet, to combat these collective distractions, we turn inward and desperately try to become more disciplined, attentive individuals. . . . Smith is not the first to name this tension, though his ‘genealogy of distraction and the disciplines of attention’ might be the first to unearth its deep cultural roots.”

—Chelsea Fitzgerald, Los Angeles Review of Books

“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