Stanley Cavell, Literature, and Film The Idea of America [Hardcover]

This is the first book to offer a thorough examination of the relationship that Stanley Cavells celebrated philosophical work has to the ways in which the United States has been imagined and articulated in its literature. Establishing the contours of Cavells most significant readings of American philosophical and cultural activity, the volume explores how his philosophy and the kind of reading it demands have an important relation to broader considerations of the American national imaginary. Focused, coherent, and original essays from a wide range of philosophers and critics consider how his investigations of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, represent a sustained engagement with the ways in which philosophy might provide us with new ways of thinking and of living. This is the first detailed and comprehensive treatment of America as a category of enquiry in Cavells writing, engaging with the terms of Cavells various configurations of the nation and offering readings of American texts that illustrate the possibilities that Cavells work has, in turn, for literary and film criticism. This study of the role played by philosophy in the articulation of the American self-imaginary highlights the ways in which the reading of literature, and the practice of philosophy, are conjoined in the ethical and political project of national self-definition.

1. Acknowledging Stanley Cavell: Paradox, Poiesis and Philosophy in America Olaf Hansen  2. Reading Cavell Reading David LaRocca  3. Stanley Cavell, Aversive Thinking, and Emersons Party of the Future David M. Robinson  4. Self-Relayance: Emerson to Poe Garrett Stewart  5. The Haunting of History: Emerson, James, and the Ghosts of Human Suffering Kristin Boudreau  6. Philosophy Out of Earshot of the School: Tocqueville and the American Philosophical Method Ois?n lSs