O'Connor, David K. Review of Richard Deming's LISTENING ON ALL SIDES. NDPR (June 2009).

Deming, Richard. Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008. Richard Deming's main project is to use the responsive openness called for in interpreting a text as a model for the ethical demands of human relationships. His secondary aim is to show that European literary theory and classical American literature are not strangers to each other, and in fact take up many of the same hopes and anxieties. The breadth and generosity of Deming's intellectual engagements are evident everywhere, and they account for the book's clear success in its secondary aim, as well as what I think are its interesting failures in its primary task. The author has done what his title asks, and listened on all sides, but his ethics is too undemanding to live up to Emerson's challenge. The "sociality" of language, writes Deming, "brings up close the issue of ethics" (14). In a way, it is no surprise that Ralph Waldo Emerson figures prominently in such a project. "I do then with my friends as I do with my books," Emerson said, and he meant it. For Emerson, reading and writing are the paradigm of all human life, and Deming does Emerson no violence in looking to him for an "ethics of reading," that is, to find guidance in our practices of attentive reading for how to treat people. Drawing the link between hermeneutics and ethics, however, may sound like rather a "continental" project, deriving as it does from early German Romantics such as the Schlegels and Schleiermacher, and having been given a major impetus by Gadamer (who quite surprisingly is never mentioned in the book). Indeed, Deming's theoretical orientation is much influenced by more recent heirs of this tradition: by Deleuze's Nietzsche readings, by Derrida, by The Literary Absolute of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, by Charles Altieri's critical work on modernism and its aftermaths. The Heideggerian gesture of the book's subtitle is also not out of place. However, after the introductory theoretical chapter, Deming focuses on classics of American literature to pursue his theme, devoting a chapter essay each to Emerson, Herman Melville, and the pair Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman all make more than cameo appearances. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=16446.