The Melville Effect: A Literary Afterlife across the Arts.

Joseph Allen Boone

Columbia University Press 2026

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-melville-effect/9780231222198/

Prof. John Lurz (Tufts University)

The Barthes Fantastic: Literature, Criticism, and the Practice of Language

University of Chicago Press

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo246540373.html

Peter E. Gordon

Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver.

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300289459/walter-benjamin/

Roderick Frazier Nash

Wilderness and the American Mind

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300190380/wilderness-and-the-american-mind/

Katie Ebner-Landy

The Character Sketch as Philosophy: Manners, Mores, Types

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674294127

Susan Stewart

Poetry's Nature

Joshua Landy (Stanford University)

Proust: A very short introduction

Caleb Smith

Thoreau's axe: Distraction and discipline in American culture

Today, we're driven to distraction, our attention overwhelmed by the many demands upon it—most of which emanate from our beeping and blinking digital devices. This may seem like a decidedly twenty-first-century problem, but, as Caleb Smith shows in this elegantly written, meditative work, distraction was also a serious concern in American culture two centuries ago. In Thoreau's Axe, Smith explores the strange, beautiful archives of the nineteenth-century attention revival—from a Protestant minister's warning against frivolous thoughts to Thoreau's reflections on wakefulness at Walden Pond. Smith examines how Americans came to embrace attention, mindfulness, and other ways of being "spiritual but not religious," and how older Christian ideas about temptation and spiritual devotion endure in our modern ideas about distraction and attention.

Smith explains that nineteenth-century worries over attention developed in response to what were seen as the damaging mental effects of new technologies and economic systems. A "wandering mind," once diagnosed, was in need of therapy or rehabilitation. Modeling his text after nineteenth-century books of devotion, Smith offers close readings of twenty-eight short passages about attention. Considering social reformers who designed moral training for the masses, religious leaders who organized Christian revivals, and spiritual seekers like Thoreau who experimented with regimens of simplified living and transcendental mysticism, Smith shows how disciplines of attention became the spiritual exercises of a distracted age.