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9781501720147

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Reading Art of the Ordinary reanimates what Ralph Waldo Emerson set as the sign of 'The Poet, ' that he 'turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession.' Deming teaches his readers how to regard the ordinary, the everyday, as though--or, better--in his phrasing, 'because it is full of the meaning that we give it.' We learn with and through Deming to make the everyday, in the words of Wallace Stevens, 'a sacrament of praise' to and for 'mere being'--an astonishing achievement! --Joan Richardson, Distinguished Professor, the Graduate Center, CUNY Reading Everyday Domain reanimates what Ralph Waldo Emerson set as the sign of The Poet, that he turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession. Deming teaches his readers how to regard the ordinary, the everyday, as though--or, better--in his phrasing, because it is full of the meaning that we give it. We learn with and through Deming to make the everyday, in the words of Wallace Stevens, a sacrament of praise to and for mere being --an astonishing achievement! --Joan Richardson, Distinguished Professor, the Graduate Center, CUNY 'The ordinary is that which is most mysterious.' It is, Richard Deming posits in this subtle, profound, and erudite book, this Heracleitian paradox, as put forward in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, and refined upon by Stanley Cavell, Arthur Danto, and Richard Wollheim, that animates such seemingly diverse artworks of the later twentieth century as the elliptical poems of John Ashbery, the 'realist' paintings of Fairfield Porter and Alex Katz, and, perhaps surprisingly, the paintings and films of Andy Warhol. Art of the Ordinary charts the process whereby the artists and poets of our own Emersonian tradition conduct their complex encounters with the ordinary. Indeed, it is the ordinary, Deming argues, that is 'the site that engenders a confluence of loss and presence, distance and proximity' in these artists' work. The dialectic in question, as Deming convincingly and passionately argues, is one that has, to date, been only dimly understood. --Marjorie Perloff, author of Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century

A trailblazing, cross-disciplinary engagement with the ordinary and the everyday. * Critics at Large *

'The ordinary is that which is most mysterious.' It is, Richard Deming posits in this subtle, profound, and erudite book, this Heracleitian paradox, as put forward in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, and refined upon by Stanley Cavell, Arthur Danto, and Richard Wollheim, that animates such seemingly diverse artworks of the later twentieth century as the elliptical poems of John Ashbery, the 'realist' paintings of Fairfield Porter and Alex Katz, and, perhaps surprisingly, the paintings and films of Andy Warhol. Art of the Ordinary charts the process whereby the artists and poets of our own Emersonian tradition conduct their complex encounters with the ordinary. Indeed, it is the ordinary, Deming argues, that is 'the site that engenders a confluence of loss and presence, distance and proximity' in these artists' work. The dialectic in question, as Deming convincingly and passionately argues, is one that has, to date, been only dimly understood. --Marjorie Perloff, author of Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century

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Richard Deming teaches in the Department of English at Yale University, where he is Director of Creative Writing. He is the author of Day for Night, Let’s Not Call It Consequence, and Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading.

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