Walter A. Davis

Davis has written two volumes of essays in cultural criticism. Death's Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche Since 9-11 (2006) contains Davis's clearest and most direct statement of his concept of "deracinating" the "guaranteees" as well as essays on the Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, Christian fundamentalism, capitalism, ethics and evil. The essay "A Postmodernist Response to 9-11: Slavoj Zizek, or the Jouissance of an Abstract Hegelian" contains Davis's critique of critical theorist Slavoj Zizek and an extended critical discussion of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Davis's 2007 book Art and Politics: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, Theatre takes the controversy surrounding the play My Name is Rachel Corrie as a jumping-off point for a discussion of the role of the arts (specifically the theatre) in post 9-11 America. The book includes Davis's "Manifesto for a Progressive Theatre" and an argument for monologue as the form that can best accomplish the necessary task of dramatically examining what Davis calls "the tragic structure of experience.".

Building on the idea of anti-bildung, Davis's 2001 book Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative takes the historical trauma of the first atomic bombing as the basis for a radically interdisciplinary investigation of trauma generally and of historical discourse in particular, culminating in a chapter that combines psychoanalysis, history and aesthetics to argue for "artistic cognition as a distinct and primary way of knowing." The "deracination" of the title refers to the necessity of "deracinating," or "rooting out," the ideological "guarantees" that structure our responses to events both personal and political.

As a theorist and critic of literature, Davis has been associated with the 'Chicago School' of R. S. Crane and Wayne C. Booth, but Davis's work shows him to be an engaged critic of these critics. His first book, The Act of Interpretation: A Critique of Literary Reason, published by The University of Chicago Press in 1978, stages a series of interpretations of William Faulkner's The Bear as a simultaneous demonstration and critique of critical pluralism. In his later book, Get The Guests: Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama, and the Audience, Davis takes a more psychoanalytic approach, analyzing in depth five American plays--The Iceman Cometh, A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, Long Day's Journey into Night, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf—in terms of their psychological impact upon the audience. Critic Frank Lentricchia called Davis's Get The Guests "unparalleled" and wrote of the author, "Davis is a man of the theatre, he reads plays as theatrical events, and he can get at plays in ways that most people of the theatre cannot because he is a superb theorist and scholar as well."

Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Davis earned a B.A. from Marquette University in 1964, an M.A. from the same institution in 1966, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1969. He taught in the English departments at the University of California at Santa Barbara from 1969 to 1977 and at Ohio State University from 1977 to 2002, when he retired to focus on writing.

Walter A. "Mac" Davis (born November 9, 1942) is an American philosopher, critic, and playwright. He is Professor Emeritus of English at Ohio State University and the author of eight books. Davis has also taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His theoretical work engages critically with psychoanalysis, Marxism, existentialism, Hegelian dialectics and postmodernism. For a more general audience, he has written plays and two volumes of essays in cultural criticism.