Loneliness as a Way of Life | 
| Author: Thomas Dumm
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $23.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 16213
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 208
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.9
ISBN: 067403113X
Dewey Decimal Number: 320.01
EAN: 9780674031135
ASIN: 067403113X
Publication Date: September 30, 2008
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Product Description
“What does it mean to be lonely?” Thomas Dumm asks. His inquiry, documented in this book, takes us beyond social circumstances and into the deeper forces that shape our very existence as modern individuals. The modern individual, Dumm suggests, is fundamentally a lonely self. Through reflections on philosophy, political theory, literature, and tragic drama, he proceeds to illuminate a hidden dimension of the human condition. His book shows how loneliness shapes the contemporary division between public and private, our inability to live with each other honestly and in comity, the estranged forms that our intimate relationships assume, and the weakness of our common bonds. A reading of the relationship between Cordelia and her father in Shakespeare’s King Lear points to the most basic dynamic of modern loneliness?how it is a response to the problem of the “missing mother.” Dumm goes on to explore the most important dimensions of lonely experience?Being, Having, Loving, and Grieving. As the book unfolds, he juxtaposes new interpretations of iconic cultural texts?Moby-Dick, Death of a Salesman, the film Paris, Texas, Emerson’s “Experience,” to name a few?with his own experiences of loneliness, as a son, as a father, and as a grieving husband and widower. Written with deceptive simplicity, Loneliness as a Way of Life is something rare?an intellectual study that is passionately personal. It challenges us, not to overcome our loneliness, but to learn how to re-inhabit it in a better way. To fail to do so, this book reveals, will only intensify the power that it holds over us. (20080930)
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| Customer Reviews:
 Pompous, Tedious, Insubstantial December 19, 2008
7 out of 10 found this review helpful
This is not a thoughtful reflection on loneliness, but a "close textual examination" (as the postmods like to say) of various texts: Death of a Salesman, Moby Dick, some Freud, some Emerson, some Thoreau and more, all appear in this small book. What does not appear--save with very welcome but sparse occasions--is unstilted, personal observations and thinking about loneliness.
A way of life? I was intrigued by the title, having encountered the idea of solitude as a way of life--but *loneliness*? This was new to me, and I hoped to hear an explication from life of how this important pang of being human might be unwoven to reveal insights new to me. Instead, what I got was a load of self-absorbed and truly *academic* writing, frequently adorned by the device of "life is death and death is life"--never with any explanation that might unfold what is apparently supposed to pass for Very Deep writing.
It's not a matter of the author's being unable to write well; occasionally, he produces lucid and lovely writing, e.g.:
Once upon a time we lived with our ghosts, we kept them in valued places as reminders of our vulnerabilities. They were helpmeets in our moral progress even as we feared their demonic presence in our lives. But World War I, Freud suggests, has shown that "this final extension is no longer experienced by civilized man." We no longer value our ghosts. Instead, our our own existence has become ghostly; we have come to haunt ourselves.
There. Why couldn't he keep to his own, obvious native talent and not insist upon forcing everything into the stilted academese that currently infects and deforms too much writing that issues from teachers? There would be more teaching in such narrative, especially when informed by and related to the actual, living encounter with the theme of the book. There would be more humility in such writing, rather than the pomposity implicit in statements such as "If these questions apply to me, they must also apply to all who are grieving." Well, no. This is one of the dubious stances taken by Freud, who is criticized for extrapolating from observations of his own thinking to the rest of humankind. This kind of doubt, however, does not appear in the present author's text.
Mr. Dumm went to Ethiopia and upon returning, found one change in his life: he began writing this book. With respect, I suggest he take up more travels and delay his next volume; perhaps it will foster a closer relationship to others--and at the least, it will get him out of the hothouse surround of academia that unhappily distorts his capacity for communication.
 This book may surprise you. October 22, 2008
6 out of 15 found this review helpful
Though it announces itself as a book about a depressing subject, LONELINESS AS A WAY OF LIFE is surprisingly uplifting
Professor Thomas Dumm, who is best know for his academic political works, (including POLITICS OF THE ORDINARY and DEMOCRACY AND PUNISHMENT) does not hide behind his footnotes in this book. In fact, he does not shy away from weaving his own life story into the discussions of great literary and cinematic works and the state of our political world. The result is a narrative that is as intellectual as it is emotional. As thought provoking as it is accessible. It may not be an easy book to read--it is, after all, about loneliness--but this book is truly worth reading. And, then, it is worth rereading.
This is a Dumm Book October 13, 2008
11 out of 16 found this review helpful
This is a terrible, misfocused book, and in trying to bring oneself as much as possible to it in response to what the author has tried to bring to it, as the author asks of each reader in his Preface, this reader found the process largely tedious and unrewarding, verifiable by a subtle but oppressive headache, having read the book over the course of one weekend. The last and longest chapter, "Grieving," is much to be avoided, or, at worst, skimmed.
This book is not authentically an exploration of loneliness nor is it a philosophy of loneliness.
This work is only a clumsy quasi-political rumination ("a convoluted intellectual and emotional journey," says the author in his Preface) about personal identity and personal loss wherein the author, a political science professor, and from a lonely vantage point in the present and in the presence or context of the Bush Administration, thinks out loud about himself and the world using epiphantic language borrowed from contemporary thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze as well as Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler and Sigmud Freud (that quack!), while also chewing on some of the wise conundrums of early American thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and W.E.B. Du Bois on the subject of identity and loss.
The author lost his mother and his wife through death, and then suffered the departure of his daughter from home. He asks, "What are we to do with our selves in the face of our losses?" This book is the consequence of asking such a question.
There is no good writing in the book. The author's favorite way of expressing himself is in "the historically contingent inevitability of individual embodiment" and as such he tries to avoid "the overcoming of the dialogue of inner thought with the solipsism of objective logic."
Almost all of the writing about loneliness per se is to be found in unsubstantianted epiphantic assertions littered quixotically between the first two chapters, "Being" and "Having": (1) "Our loneliness is always deepest in those moments when we face the terror of nothing." (2)"We too live in the matrix of the missing mother. . . . This is the way of loneliness." (3) "...loneliness itself involves a failure of the self-descriptive capacity." (4) "...loneliness is an experience of disappearance...." (5) "At its worst, loneliness is a denial of the possibility of a politics of becoming." (6) "When we are lonely we are actually alone, deserted by all others, including our own other self." (7) The state of loneliness . . . is an experience composed of a loss of the capacity to experience." (8) "To be lonely is to be without recourse to others." (9) "...capitalism may be thought of as a symptom of the lonely self." (10) "...loneliness derives from a condition of being superfluous that grows out of uprootedness, the lacking of a place in the world..."
The last two chapters, "Loving" and "Grieving" discuss little about loneliness itself at all; they're totally focused on loss.
The enjoyable parts of the book consist of the author's literary analyses: the missing mother and Cordelia's silent role in "King Lear," the relationship between the father and the son and their respective identities in "Death of a Salesman," the relationship and identity of Ishmael and Pip in "Moby Dick," and a retelling of the film "Paris, Texas," which reveals the author's personal insights into the importance of this film. The writing here is relatively free of pretentious cant and reader-friendly. Still, none of these analyses has anything to do with the theme loneliness; they have all to do with tropes of loss and identity.
In the Epilogue entitled "Writing," the author confesses he is using the writing for his book to help with his grieving process and to come to terms with his new identity as a widower. "Loneliness as a way of life"? Hardly.
Johanne Goethe wrote something salubrious and pertinent to the contents of Mr. Dumm's book but it is something which he did not reference in his book:
"Get wise to yourself, now trot
Out of that mucky grove!
There's more to earth than this spot --
Move!"
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