His theoretical work engages critically with psychoanalysis, Marxism, existentialism, Hegelian dialectics and postmodernism.
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.
"[5] Davis's most wide-ranging philosophical work is Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, and Freud.
In his consideration of Hegel, Davis argues that the Structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Deconstruction of Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, et al. represent prematurely arrested moments in a dialectical movement issuing in Hegelian "unhappy consciousness."
The struggle to achieve freedom and authenticity proceeds through the hard intellectual work that Davis calls "anti-bildung", the rooting out of all the ideological obfuscations that have been implanted in us by our families and cultures.
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"[9] as well as essays on the Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, Christian fundamentalism, capitalism, ethics and evil.
His plays include: The Holocaust Memorial: A Play About Hiroshima; An Evening with JonBenet Ramsey, an exploration of the effects of childhood trauma; Between Two Deaths: Life on the Row, a monologue spoken by a murderer on death row; and Trim: The Tyger Woods Story, a satire of celebrity, media and race in America.