Ornamental Aesthetics

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 primaryinvestment 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 theaesthetic 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., The structure of Davis's book is fluid and reciprocating, folding and unfolding like a river current. Her lively "personal" voice, larded with allusions to continental theory and Buddhist scholarship, can seem somewhat idiosyncratic. However, Davis's essayistic style enhances this sleek treatment of Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman, which borders at times on an aesthetic and critical manifesto. Her writing is entirely consistent with her essential claim: that Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman's counter-poetics offer us a new approach to writing a phenomenal world that is in essence fluctuating and co-constructed - an approach that foregrounds the essential work of ornament as a means of marking-out, honoring, and giving praise.

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