Ornamental Aesthetics: The Poetry of Attending in Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman

ISBN-13: 9780190080983 / Angielski / Miękka / 2019 / 260 str.

Theo Davis

Opis

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.

Recenzje

With this wonderful volume Davis...continues the masterful treatment of formalism in 19th-century American literature...Her readings of Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman evoke both the sense of wonder (to contemplate) and the sense of wonder (to produce awe)...the study moves adeptly between classical studies of rhetoric and the politics of New Historicism. The three writers are covered in separate chapters. Davis's examinations are not exhaustive; rather, she establishes a theory of ornamentation in 19th-century American literature. Davis's readings...suggest a formalism present in American poetics. For Davis, poetic theory oscillates between classical theories of ornaments and the postmodern drive to undermine agency. The poet's world is neither representational nor purely phenomenological; rather, it resides in the interstices of poet/world and the world of reader/text.

O autorze

Theo Davis is Professor of English at Northeastern University and the author of Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature in the Nineteenth Century.