Books by Richard Deming

Lawyers are much in demand these days -- overworked and, as some would claim, overpriced. More and more people find themselves needing legal advice in such matters as making a will, buying a house, defending a suit for damages (or entering one), starting a business, securing one's rights as a consumer, obtaining a divorce. How is the gap to be bridged between the supply of lawyers and demand for services? One answer, growing in popularity everywhere, is the paralegal, also called the lawyer's assistant, legal assistant, paralegal assistant, or paralegal associate.

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 explores its relationship to its source novel, Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson, which apparently Welles never read; 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.

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 "e;self"e; and "e;other"e; 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.

A collection of poems, which engage the content and form of anger, violence, intimacy, and the poetics of proximity.

Bringing together Continental literary theory and Anglo-American philosophy, Listening on All Sides reads the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathanial Hawthorne, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams to uncover the role literary texts play in the way that language use creates and defines culture and ethics.