The Holiday in His Eye: Stanley Cavell's Vision of Film and Philosophy

Description

From The World Viewed to Cities of Words, writing about movies was strand over strand with Stanley Cavell's philosophical work. Cavell was one of the first philosophers in the United States to make film a significant focus of his thought, and William Rothman has long been one of his most astute readers. The Holiday in His Eye collects Rothman's writings about Cavell--many of them previously unpublished--to offer a lucid, serious introduction to and overview of Cavell's work, the influence of which has been somewhat limited by both the intrinsic difficulty of his ideas and his challenging prose style. In these engaging and accessible yet philosophically serious and rigorously argued essays, Rothman presents an original, insightful, and compelling vision of the trajectory of Cavell's oeuvre, one that takes Cavell's kinship with Emerson as inextricably bound up with his ever-deepening thinking about movies. Contents Preface 1 Cavell Reading Cavell 2 Introduction to Reading Cavell’s “The World Viewed” (with Marian Keane) 3 Sights and Sounds (with Marian Keane) 4 The Acknowledgment of Silence (with Marian Keane) 5 Cavell’s Philosophy and What Film Studies Calls “Theory” Statement Read at Plenary Session of the 1991 Society for Cinema Studies Annual Meeting 6 Response to Vivian Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye 7 Pursuits of Happiness: Cavell in Transition 8 In Defense of Pursuits of Happiness 9 Viewing the World in Black and White Now, Voyager Stella Dallas Blonde Venus Show Boat Imitation of Life 10 Cavell’s Creation Who Is Stanley Cavell? Who Is Cary Grant? “Stella’s Taste” 11 Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used to Be 12 Cavell on Film, Television, and Opera (excerpts) “The Fact of Television” Contesting Tears “Opera and the Lease of Voice” “Opera in and as Film” 13 Cavell on Film: Introduction 14 The Same Again, Only a Little Different: Cavell’s Two Takes on The Philadelphia Story 15 Cavell, Emerson, Hitchcock: Reflections Inspired by Stanley Cavell’s Cities of Words 16 On Richard Allen’s “Hitchcock and Cavell” 17 Introduction to Must We Kill the Thing We Love? Emersonian Perfectionism and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock 18 On Stanley Cavell’s Band Wagon Epilogue 19 “Excerpts from Memory”: Autobiography, Film, and the Double Existence of Cavell’s Philosophical Prose 20 Stanley Cavell, Victor Perkins, and the Personal Afterword Works Cited Index