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List of contents
Preface: Stanley Cavell and Cinema
Thomas Elsaesser, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Introduction: Philosophy’s Claim to Film, Film’s Claim to Philosophy
David LaRocca, Cornell University, USA
Part I. Underwriting and Overhearing: Reconceiving Cinematic Ontology and Genre
1. “Assertions in Technique”: Tracking the Medial “Thread” in Cavell’s Filmic Ontology
Garrett Stewart, University of Iowa, USA
2. Revisiting The World Viewed
Noël Carroll, Graduate Center of the City University of New York, USA
3. The World Heard
Kyle Stevens, Appalachian State University, USA
4. What a Genre of Film Might Be: Medium, Myth, and Morality
Stephen Mulhall, New College, Oxford University, UK
Part II. Interlude: Temperaments for Film
5. My Troubled Relationship with Stanley Cavell: In Pursuit of a Truly Cinematic Conversation
Scott MacDonald, Hamilton College, USA
6. Film as Film and the Personal
William Rothman, University of Miami, USA
Part III. Philosophy, as if Made for Film
7. Between Skepticism and Perfectionism: On Cavell’s Melodrama of the Unknown Woman
Robert Sinnerbrink, Macquarie University, Australia
8. Overcoming Skepticism in Casablanca
Thomas E. Wartenberg, Mount Holyoke College, USA
9. A Skeptic’s Reprieve: Cavell on Comedy in Shakespeare and the Movies
Lawrence F. Rhu, University of South Carolina, USA
Part IV. Film, as if Made for Philosophy
10. Film Exists in a State of Philosophy: Two Contemporary Cavellian Views
Shawn Loht, Baton Rouge Community College, USA
11. The Conception of Film for the Subject of Television: Moral Education of the Public and a Return to an Aesthetics of the Ordinary
Sandra Laugier, Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, France
12. On Film in Reality: Cavellian Reflections on Skepticism, Belief, and Documentary
Mathew Abbott, Federation University, Australia
13. On the Aesthetics of Amateur Filmmaking in Narrative Cinema: Negotiating Home Movies after Adam’s Rib
David LaRocca, Cornell University, USA
Acknowledgements
Index
Contributors
About the author
David LaRocca, Ph.D., is the author or contributing editor of seventeen books, including several from Bloomsbury. He edited Stanley Cavell’s Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes (2003) and Metacinema (2021). Earlier edited volumes are devoted to the philosophy of documentary film, war films, and the cinema of Charlie Kaufman. He has taught philosophy, rhetoric, and cinema and held visiting research or teaching positions in the United States at Binghamton University, Cornell University, Harvard University, Ithaca College, the New York Public Library, the School of Visual Arts, the State University of New York at Cortland, and Vanderbilt University. He served as Harvard University’s Sinclair Kennedy Fellow in the United Kingdom and, like Cavell before him, was honored with the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society. www.DavidLaRocca.org
Summary
Stanley Cavell was, by many accounts, America's greatest philosophical thinker of film. Like Bazin in France and Perkins in England, Cavell did not just transform the American capacity to take film as a subject for philosophical criticism; he had to first invent that legitimacy. Part of that effort involved the creation of several key now-canonical texts in film studies, among them the seminal The World Viewed along with Pursuits of Happiness and Contesting Tears. The present collection offers, for the first time anywhere, a concerted effort mounted by some of today's most compelling writers on film to take careful account of Cavell's legacy. The contributors think anew about what precisely Cavell contributed, what holds up, what is in need to revision or updating, and how his writing continues to be of vital significance and relevance for any contemporary approach to the philosophy of film.
Foreword
A re-engagement with Stanley Cavell’s wide expanse of work in film and philosophy, from the cutting edge of a diversity of fields, subfields, and evolving disciplinary developments.
Additional text
A brilliant collection of original essays by major figures in the field. The genius of Cavell's writings on film is in sharp focus throughout -- likewise the continued provocation of The World Viewed and its successor books and essays.
