Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | P | Philological Quarterly

Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading.

Article Excerpt
Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading by Richard Deming. Stanford U. Press, 2007. Pp. 182. $50.

At the same time that we moderns learned about living in regimes of vision that include spectacle (Guy Debord, Laura Mulvey), panopticon (Foucault), and print (Walter Ong), our literary criticism skewed towards vision at the expense of the other senses, especially hearing. Think of the close reading that runs from the New Criticism to deconstruction and beyond, or what Charles Bernstein calls the "Euclidean" prosody of most modern poetics (Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word [Oxford U. Press, 1998]). Ironically, we still see evidence for this hearing loss in recent literary criticism such as Richard Deming's Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading, which, like Helen Vendler's Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery (Princeton U. Press, 2005), paradoxically inscribes a regime of vision into its very title. For her part, Vendler regularly reduces listeners to readers through an aggressive form of synesthesia common in our critical moment when readerly interpretation, engagement, and understanding are usually figured visually. For instance her architecture for the eye situates the lyric poem's addressee "in the room" or out, rather than maintaining a distinctly aural orientation characteristic of the material she examines, including most obviously George Herbert's devotional lyric ("Heaven...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!