Listening on All Sides - by Richard Deming (Hardcover)

About the Book

Bringing together Continental literary theory and Anglo-American philosophy, Listening on All Sides reads the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathanial Hawthorne, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams to uncover the role literary texts play in the way that language use creates and defines culture and ethics.

Book Synopsis

Bringing together Continental literary theory and Anglo-American philosophy, Listening on All Sides reads the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathanial Hawthorne, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams to uncover the role literary texts play in the way that language use creates and defines culture and ethics.

Review Quotes

"Richard Deming's Listening on All Sides will take a serious place in the decades-long revival of writing about Emerson."--Timothy Gould " Modern Philology"

"Richard Deming's Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading is a beautifully written book that approaches recent thinking about Emerson, especially that of Stanley Cavell and Richard Poirier, from the point of view of poetics rather than philosophy or literary theory. Demings study of what he calls 'Emersonian modernism' includes refreshing readings of Dickinson, Melville, Williams, and Stevens. The book is both philosophically engaging and meticulously researched."--Charles Bernstein "University of Pennsylvania"

"Listening on All Sides is a nuanced and meticulous examination of the philosophical possibilities of and in literature . . . an ambitious book that enjoins the reader to pay careful attention to the slipperiness of texts, to notice how those moments where the possibilities of belief are articulated, and above all to understand how writing remains in continual conversation with itself as the means by which aversive thinking might be maintained."--

"Overall, the focus of Deming's study is refined and often brilliant, most especially in the freshness it brings to the poetics of Emerson."--The Wallace Stevens Journal

"Richard Deming's book advances a project of sensual reorientation in the spirit of Stanley Cavell's ordinary language philosophy, and his achievements are noteworthy in a few directions, including a sophisticated intertextuality, a knack for aphorisms, and most importantly a contribution to literary ethics where the ear can play a central role."--Philological Quarterly

About the Author

Richard Deming is a Lecturer for the English Department at Yale University, where he co-ordinates the Whitney Humanities Center Working Seminar on Contemporary Poetry and Poetics.