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Stanley Cavell's American Dream
Shakespeare, Philosophy, and Hollywood Movies
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Book Presentation:
This book explores Cavell’s writings along converging lines of thought rather than in isolated categories. The author claims that, after Cavell’s celebrated reading of King Lear turned into a nightmarish meditation on Vietnam, he found a more audible voice. Noting that Cavell’s keen ear for the expressive power of ordinary language makes him both a first-rate literary artist and a compelling philosopher of the everyday, he catches what holds Cavell’s manifold interests together. Here the poetry of ideas and presence of mind that animate Cavell’s writing receive readings attuned to the spirit of their composition and its enlivening powers.
About the Author:
Lawrence F. Rhu is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of The Genesis of Tasso's Narrative Theory: English Translations of the Early Poetics and a Comparative Study of Their Significance. Stanley Cavell is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Harvard University. His recent publications include A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises; Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, and Derrida; Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life and Emerson's Transcendental Etudes.
Press Reviews:
Stanley Cavell's American Dream moves from discussions of Cavell's philosophy to readings of Walker Percy, Harold Bloom, Shakespeare, Emerson, and contemporary novelist Jane Smiley, traversing institutional divides with a grace and lucidity which recalls the best writing of such stylistically-gifted critics as Hugh Kenner and Alfred Kazin. Rewarding
and pleasurable to read.
---—R.M. Berry, author of Frank
"Lawrence Rhu's wonderful volume on Stanley Cavell teaches us how to enjoy all Cavell's eloquent, casual, ceremonious, solemn, and high comic ways.---—David Mikics, University of Houston
Stanley Cavell's American Dream is an insightful, original contribution to Shakespeare criticism, film criticism, and to our theoretical understanding of the relationship between the two great arts.---—William Rothman, editor of Cavell on Film and coauthor of Reading Cavell's The World Viewed
Rhu shows how Cavell's philosophy is inseparable from his interest in Shakespeare and Hollywood and so, indirectly, how the interests of an important philosopher are just like anyone else's, and how philosophy for Cavell represents one of the few remaining possibilities of expressing one's simultaneous affection for both Hamlet and North by Northwest.---—Miguel Tamen, author of Friends of Interpretable Objects
A generous invitation for readers to profit from Cavell's Emersonian ways of combining Shakespeare's evergreen worlds with those of Holly wood's Golden Age.---—Stephen Mulhall, author of Stanley Cavell: Philosophy's Recounting of the Ordinary and editor of The Cavell Reader
This book brightly illuminates the work of Shakespeare, Emerson and Hollywood melodrama and re-marriage comedy as well as the work of the thinker who has given us such extraordinary pathways into them.---—Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God
Rhu's stated aim is to read Cavell's studies of Shakespeare and Hollywood and transcendentalism together, rather than separating them into disciplinary distinctness, as has been the standard. . . Recommended. - —Choice
A work for every Shakespearean—experts and amateurs, teachers and their students, whom this book will delight and instruct. Its eloquence and accessiblity make it ideal for graduate and undergraduate classes.---—John Tobin, coeditor of The Riverside Shakespeare
See the publisher website: Fordham University Press
> On a related topic:
Thinking Film (2023)
Philosophy at the Movies
Dir. Richard Kearney and M. E. Littlejohn
Subject: Theory
Reading Cavell's the World Viewed (2000)
A Philosophical Perspective on Film
by Marian Keane and William Rothman
Subject: Theory
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