Thoreau's axe : distraction and discipline in American culture / Caleb Smith.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Smith, Caleb, 1977- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--19th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

Genre:

Literary criticism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (256 p.)

Place of Publication:

Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, [2023]

Language Note:

In English.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Summary:

"When did the age of distraction begin? It might seem like a new problem, a symptom of our digital addictions, but distraction was already a source of deep concern in American culture two hundred years ago. As the industrial market economy emerged, nineteenth-century observers saw the signs: Workers were wasting time, daydreaming on the job, and the public's attention was overstimulated by new media and consumer trends. In response, social reformers designed innovative systems of moral training for the masses. Religious leaders organized far-reaching Christian revivals. And spiritual seekers like Henry David Thoreau experimented on themselves, practicing regimens of simplified living and transcendental mysticism. From the solitary confinement cells of the earliest penitentiaries to the shores of Walden Pond, disciplines of attention became the spiritual exercises of a distracted age. Through twenty-eight short passages on reform, religion, and literature from the strange and beautiful archives of this nineteenth-century attention revival, Caleb Smith reads with an eye for both language and power. Disciplines of attention, he argues, often reinforce a morally conservative social order. At the same time, exercising more careful control over our own attention promises to give us some distance from the consumer marketplace-and, today, from the algorithmic manipulations of the online attention economy. Smith writes with vigilance about the history of coercion, but also with guarded hope about practices of attention, including reading itself. From the benefits of attentive reading to the darker side of enforced attention in prisons and reformatories, this book examines distraction as a moral, political, and economic problem with a long and illuminating history"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction: Distraction and the Disciplines of Attention

Part I. From the devil to distraction

Introduction

1 “Wandring or distraction”

2 “Satan had hidden the very object from my mind”

3 “Hundreds of thousands have their appetite so depraved”

4 “My non-compliance would almost always produce much confusion”

5 “Opium-like listlessness”

6 “Morbid attention”

7 “The shell of lethargy”

Part II. Reform

8 “A white man could, if he had paid as much attention”

9 “The cultivation of attention as a moral duty”

10 “The heart must be cultivated”

11 “You might see him looking steadily at something”

12 “Their nobler faculties lie all undeveloped”

13 “Subdued and tender”

14 “If he wanted to kill time”

Part III. Revival

15 “All attention to the last sermon”

16 “The power of fixed and continuous attention”

17 “The relations of business and religion”

18 “My mind was powerfully wrought upon”

19 “I began to direct my attention to this great object”

20 “Hear me now, love your heart”

21 “Read these leaves in the open air”

Part IV: Devotion

22 “Noble sentiments of devotion”

23 “Savoir attendre”

24 “The greatest exercise of mind”

25 “A true sauntering of the eye”

26 “If we do not guard the mind”

27 “The valves of her attention”

28 “Aroma finer than prayer”

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

A NOTE ON THE TYPE

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780691215280

0691215286

OCLC:

1349277546