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In "Listening on All Sides," Richard Deming finds an intersection
of literature and philosophy in the poetics of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Herman Melville, Nathanial Hawthorne, Wallace Stevens, and William
Carlos Williams that offers aesthetic models for the construction
of community. Building on the work of Stanley Cavell, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, and J. L. Austin, Deming challenges current trends in
American literary studies and advances the newly developing field
of ordinary language criticism. Continental literary theory and
Anglo-American philosophy work together in this book to uncover the
role literary texts play in the way that language use creates and
defines culture.
Orson Welles' classic 1958 noir movie Touch of Evil, the story of a
corrupt police chief in a small town on the Mexican-American
border, starring Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh and Marlene Dietrich,
is widely recognised as one of the greatest noir films of Classical
Hollywood cinema. Richard Deming's study of the film considers it
as an outstanding example of the noir genre and explores its
complex relationship to its source novel, Badge of Evil by Whit
Masterson. He traces the film's production history, and provides an
insightful close analysis of its key scenes, including its famous
opening sequence, a single take in which the camera follows a
booby-trapped car on its journey through city streets and across
the border.
"Much of this book is a dense, exhilarating ride through
phantasmagoria, illuminated by bright, gleaming generalities:
'someone in the audience will wonder if that is how we are meant to
survive our memories.' How are we to survive not only our memories,
but diminishment and nightmare? Many of the gods who preside here
are movie makers, from Jacques Tourneur to Takashi Miike. But
startlingly, these mysterious and eloquent poems culminate in the
long, next-to-last, magnificent poem 'Son et Lumiere.' Stevens now
is the fecund model, as Richard Deming modulates beautifully
between four- and five- and even six-line stanzas. This is a
tremendously accomplished, fascinating book." -Frank Bidart
Poetry. In LET'S NOT CALL IT CONSEQUENCE, Richard Deming's first
full-length collection of poems, the poet brings together
abstraction and precise images to explore the intensities and
reversals of lyric thinking, that "infinitely stuttering thing."
These poems searchingly engage the content and form of anger,
violence, intimacy, and the poetics of proximity, exploring the
intricacies of language use to find the ways that "to ache, so to
speak, is human." "'If only/this thinking thing thought thoughts
only.' Richard Deming restlessly calculates the split between
promised and actual experience. The poems in his impressive new
collection balance at an edge of danger syntax can only shadow.
Urgency of the day. Argument of the ordinary. 'Each/comma ticks
like sleet against/a windowpane. In the cold dawn.'"--Susan Howe.
Cutting across literature, film, art, and philosophy, Art of the
Ordinary is a trailblazing, cross-disciplinary engagement with the
ordinary and the everyday. Because, writes Richard Deming, the
ordinary is always at hand, it is, in fact, too familiar for us to
perceive it and become fully aware of it. The ordinary he argues,
is what most needs to be discovered and yet is something that can
never be approached, since to do so is to immediately change it.
Art of the Ordinary explores how philosophical questions can be
revealed in surprising places-as in a stand-up comic's routine, for
instance, or a Brillo box, or a Hollywood movie. From negotiations
with the primary materials of culture and community, ways of
reading "self" and "other" are made available, deepening one's
ability to respond to ethical, social, and political dilemmas.
Deming picks out key figures, such as the philosophers Stanley
Cavell, Arthur Danto, and Richard Wollheim; poet John Ashbery;
artist Andy Warhol; and comedian Steven Wright, to showcase the
foundational concepts of language, ethics, and society. Deming
interrogates how acts of the imagination by these people, and
others, become the means for transforming the alienated ordinary
into a presence of the everyday that constantly and continually
creates opportunities of investment in its calls on interpretive
faculties. In Art of the Ordinary, Deming brings together the arts,
philosophy, and psychology in new and compelling ways so as to
offer generative, provocative insights into how we think and
represent the world to others as well as to ourselves.
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