Ornamental Aesthetics: The Poetry of Attending in Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman
- ISBN-10
- 0190467517
- ISBN-13
- 9780190467517
- Category
- Aesthetics in literature
- Pages
- 264
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2016-07-25
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Authors
- Associate Professor of English Theo Davis, Theo Davis
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.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2016-06-07
- 288 pages
- Ebook
- Oxford University Press
Similar books
-
Vom Erhabenen und vom Komischen: über eine prekäre Konstellation ; für Rolf-Peter Janz
By Thomas Koebner, Hans Richard BrittnacherVom Erhabenen und vom Komischen: über eine prekäre Konstellation ; für Rolf-Peter Janz
-
Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Essays on Aesthetics
By Rabindranath TagoreRabindranath Tagore: Selected Essays on Aesthetics
-
Fusion of Critical Horizons in Chinese and Western Language, Poetics, Aesthetics
By Ming Dong GuSo, they imitated (ni) the shapes (xing) and appearances (rong) of the universe to represent [xiang] the meanings appropriate to a particular object. This was how the imitations came to be called images (xiang).”34 In this statement, ...
-
The Signifying Self: Cervantine Drama as Counter-perspective Aesthetic
By Melanie HenryMeixell has recently highlighted the function of Malgesi's dramatic productions as particularly interesting 'because it focuses on the question of the magician as creator of fiction'.162 This analysis of the wizard underscores Malgesi ...
-
Die Organisation der Sinne: Wahrnehmungstheorie und Ästhetik in Laurence Sternes Tristram Shandy
By Erika Sophie HopmannWahrnehmungstheorie und Ästhetik in Laurence Sternes Tristram Shandy Erika Sophie Hopmann ... Berkeley, George: Versuch über eine neue Theorie des Sehens und Die Theorie des Sehens oder der visuellen Sprache ... verteidigt und erklärt.
-
Das Radikale: gesellschafts-politische und formal-ästhetische Aspekte in der Gegenwartsliteratur
By Carsten Roth, Stephanie Willeke, Ludmila Petersgesellschafts-politische und formal-ästhetische Aspekte in der Gegenwartsliteratur Stephanie Willeke, Ludmila Peters, ... In: Literarische und politische Deutschlandkonzepte. 1938-1949. Hg. v. Gunther Nickel. Göttingen 2004, S. 11-45.
-
Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies: An Aesthetics in All Things
By Cody Marrs... Melville's engagements with various spiritual traditions, see William Potter, Melville's Clarel and the Intersympathy of Creeds (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2004); Yothers, Sacred Uncertainty; and the essays in Visionary of ...
-
Kissing the Wild Woman: Art, Beauty, and the Reformation of the Italian Prose Romance in Giulia Bigolina's Urania
By Christopher NissenKissing the Wild Woman's analysis of this little-known work adds a new dimension to the study of Renaissance aesthetics in relation to art history, Renaissance thought, women's studies, and Italian literature.
-
Virginia Woolf and Classical Music: Politics, Aesthetics, Form
By Emma SuttonAs this collection shows, strangely haunting and deeply unsettling, Rhys's portraits of dispossessed women living in the early and late twentieth-century continue to trouble easy conceptualisations and critical categories.
-
The Baroque Technotext: Literature in a Digital Mediascape
By Elise TakehanaTo date, most criticism of print and digital technotexts--literary objects that foreground the role of their media of inscription--has emphasized the avant-garde contexts of a text's production.