Cover art: Mast by Rachel Melis; cover design by Tim Roberts.

Richard Deming's Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading was published by Stanford Univeristy Press in January 2008.

In Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading, Richard Deming  reads the poetics of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathanial Hawthorne, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams as developing an intersection of literature and philosophy that offers aesthetic models for the construction of possibilities of community.   Grounded in close readings of literary texts by these authors, Listening on All Sides interrogates the most foundational concepts of language, ethics, and community, those that serve as the bulwark of the network of human ideas, locating its analyses in the conditions of culture as well as in the conditionality that constitutes culture.  Challenging current trends in American literary studies, the manuscript advances the newly developing field of ordinary language criticism, which is built on the work of Stanley Cavell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and J. L. Austin.  This methodology brings together Continental literary theory and Anglo-American philosophy to uncover the role literary texts play in the way that language use creates and defines culture.

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