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Reviewed by:
  • Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading
  • Randy L. Friedman
Richard Deming. Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. viii + 182 pp. Index.

Reading a book for a review is not the same as reading for pleasure or research. The voice of the ‘critic’—or the critic one would like to be—muffles the voice of the text. Reviewing a book on reading, written by a writer, is as disconcerting as speaking with an old high school English [End Page 114] teacher. I take courage from Emerson. In “The Poet,” an essay to which Richard Deming often returns, Emerson offers:

Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say, “It is in me, and shall out.” Stand there, baulked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until, at last, rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.

Doubtless, I am not a poet and will not conduct much electricity. Hopefully, I will not stammer, hiss, or hoot. (We will return to the possibility of a transcending power.)

Deming takes Emerson seriously. He fits in a line of modern thinkers which includes Stanley Cavell, Jonathan Levin, Richard Poirier, David Robinson, and Stephen Whicher. Deming draws heavily on Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, as well as many, many philosophers and critics. Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Benjamin, Barthes and Rorty are all conversation partners. The Emersonian ethics of reading which Deming constructs is applied to texts by Melville, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Dickinson, and others. Though the book runs under two hundred pages, the reader is bound to come away having read an interpretation of someone about whom she feels she should know more.

Though my concerns are nitpicky, especially given the achievement of the book, I will offer a few philosophical hesitations. I do not agree with Deming that Emerson anticipates the linguistic turn in philosophy (76). I find the sublime (even something a bit metaphysical) in Emerson, encountered through experience. And I always seem to turn back to the Over-soul as a central unifying, ameliorating ‘something’ which the subject discovers as her own source—the core of her subjectivity. This reading, of course, does not fit well with Deming. In places, though, Deming himself challenges the Wittgenstein-Austin-Cavell Emerson.

Deming does more than offer exceptional readings of Emerson, Williams, and Stevens. He constructs an Emersonian ethics of reading, “to change our stance toward language . . . to be self-conscious of the self by way of the act of reading. This stance includes recovering responsibility for one’s own values” (156). It is too early to begin the nitpicking, but Deming seems to be demanding much less than Emerson. Rediscovering the self, re-grounding the self, is a theme throughout Emerson—from his sermons through his late lectures. I am not convinced that Deming misses this in Emerson, though he ignores the metaphysical ‘commitments’ which Emerson finds necessary for the reconstruction of the self. This possible point of disagreement does nothing to diminish or to dispute Deming’s thesis.

There is no formal conclusion to the book. The final chapter, “Response and Responsibility: Stevens, Williams, and the Ethics of [End Page 115] Modernism,” ends on the same Emersonian note with which the book begins:

It is not revision that we can speak of, since our vision, and our version is incomplete. What is left is a continual starting out in speech, sounding the dimensions of language and the shape and hew of possible thought. We speak, we write, we argue to sound out the dimensions of linguistic and conceptual space, such stuff as lives are made on. If a vocabulary is in flux, then conversation must go on in order to get things straight. The result is that the discussion can go on, in all its articulate stammerings and hesitations of inclination and affections, perpetually circling around and out, to begin again.

(156–57)

Deming’s ‘philosophy’ writing is inviting (and will bring the reader...

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