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

• Published in: Studies in Romanticism Vol. 56; no. 2; pp. 297 - 300
• Main Author: Moskowitz, Alex
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Boston THE GRADUATE SCHOOL · BOSTON UNIVERSITY 01.07.2017; Johns Hopkins University Press
• Subjects: Literature; Materialism; Ontology; Philosophy; Poetry
• ISSN: 0039-3762; 2330-118X

Though her argument is not exactly an object-oriented ontology, Davis does want to borrow from various strains of new materialism to allow that objects themselves have an affective quality that cannot be entirely contained within the mind-that, to reference Bennett's book, there is a certain vibrancy to matter that exists regardless of whether there is a mind to make sense of it or not. Most important is the move Davis makes to dissolve the divide between the mind and the object while simultaneously maintaining the solidity of each: "what we will see increasingly is how fully thinking ornament entails abandoning the notion that thinking is an internal process always opposed to, and apart from, the world of things, objects, or others" (35). Whitman's praise of the strange or the ugly in effect resists a democratic openness that could one day come to find something like slavery beautiful; the corollary of this point is that such a field could, on the other side, also find room for marginalized groups. While this is not inherently a problem, and plenty of successful scholarship delicately navigates the path between philosophy and literature, Davis's application of Heidegger serves more as an interesting companion piece to Dickinson.