Ornamental Aesthetics
The Poetry of Attending in Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP USA
- Date of Publication 11 August 2016
- ISBN 9780190467517
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages264 pages
- Size 147x211x25 mm
- Weight 408 g
- Language English 0
Categories
Short description:
Theo Davis argues that ornamental aesthetics are central to Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman's writing, exploring the stakes of such an ornamental aesthetics through a parallel investigation of the ornamental aspects of Heidegger's phenomenological philosophy.
MoreLong description:
Ornamental Aesthetics offers a theory of ornamentation as a manner of marking out objects for notice, attention, praise, and a means of exploring qualities of mental engagement other than interpretation and representation. Although Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman were hostile to the overdecorated rooms and poems of nineteenth-century culture, their writings are full of references to chandeliers, butterflies, diamonds, and banners which indicate their primary investment in ornamentation as a form of attending.
Theo Davis argues that this essential quality of ornamentation has been obscured by the enduring emphasis of literary studies on the structure of representation, and on how meaning is embodied in material form. Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman's sense of ornamentation as a manner of attending is grounded in an understanding of poetry as an adornment to the world, and thus as a way of relating to what is present rather than of representing it. Ornamental Aesthetics investigates the aesthetic practices of Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman through readings of the writings of Martin Heidegger, which also presents the human mind as an agitated, responsive, and ornamental presence.
Drawing together work in poetics, rhetoric, philosophy, and nineteenth-century American literature, Ornamental Aesthetics ultimately argues that the kinds of immediate experience of attending which concerns ornamentation should retain a central place in the study of literature and the humanities more broadly.
And yet the use of Heidegger and Davis's astute sense of the critical tradition is precisely what allows her to pull off such impressive and singular readings of Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman. Indeed, Davis is truly at her best after she has provided the theoretical and philosophical ground upon which her argument rests. In an oversaturated field of scholarship, it seems to me for these reasons that Davis's work is one with which we must contend.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
To Ornament
Part One
Thoreau: An Ornament To Nature
Part Two
Dickinson: Ornamentation and the Open
Part Three
Whitman: Ornamental Distinction
Bibliography
