"The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film," by Stanley Cavell

1973 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 384-385
Author(s):  
William L. Blizek ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
The World

: The World Viewed . Stanley Cavell.

1972 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 28-29
Author(s):  
Leo Braudy
Keyword(s):  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
The World

I Love You. Who Are You? The Strategy of Drama in Recognition Scenes

PMLA ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 92 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-306
Author(s):  
Helene Keyssar
Keyword(s):  
King Lear ◽  
Audience Participation ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
The World ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Critical Process

Audience participation in theater often obscures or confuses the magical nature of the activity of theater. The uniqueness of this activity is centered in the separateness of the world of the play from the world of the audience, as Stanley Cavell remarks. The importance of such separateness becomes vivid in recognition scenes which are the structural core of most drama. Aristotle perceives the importance of recognition scenes, but does not show adequately what such scenes do to the spectator. The recognition scenes in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s King Lear reveal drama’s special ability to allow the spectator to acknowledge another while himself remaining private. The critical process involved in coming to such an understanding of drama, while similar to some elements of structuralistic analysis, focuses more directly on a concern with the patterns of relationship between play and audience. My methodology corresponds to Stanley Fish’s “affective” stylistics.

Moral Philosophy after Austin and Wittgenstein: Stanley Cavell and Donald MacKinnon

2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-64
Author(s):  
Andrew D. Bowyer
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
North American ◽  
Moral Realism ◽  
Political Liberalism ◽  
Moral Discourse ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
The World ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Christian Socialism ◽  
1960S And 1970S

There are broad commonalities between the projects of Donald MacKinnon (1913–1994) and Stanley Cavell (1926–) sufficient to make the claim that they struck an analogous pose in their respective contexts. This is not to discount their manifest differences. In the milieu of 1960s and 1970s Cambridge, MacKinnon argued in support of a qualified language of metaphysics in the service of a renewed catholic humanism and Christian socialism. At Harvard, Cavell articulated commitments that made him more at home in the world of North American secular political liberalism. Where Nietzsche, Hume, Freud, Heidegger, Emerson and Thoreau were Cavell’s inspirations, Butler, Kant, G. E. Moore, Collingwood and the New Testament were MacKinnon’s. For all the stark differences, commonalities abound and the reason for this can be traced to a shared appreciation of Austin’s contribution to the ‘lingusitic turn’ together with Wittgenstein’s later work. They both developed projects obsessed with the problem of scepticism together with a commitment to a creative re-animation of moral discourse in light of it, with MacKinnon defending a qualified ‘moral realism’, and Cavell, ‘moral perfectionism’. Seen together, a distinctive post-Kantian and post-Wittgensteinian therapeutic moral philosophy is in evidence.

scholarly journals Stanley Cavell, Philosopher Untamed

2020 ◽  
pp. 43-45
Author(s):  
Lindsay Waters
Keyword(s):  
Hilary Putnam ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
The World

Why not use the word “star,” Stanley asked in his breakthrough book on movies, The World Viewed, why not “the more beautiful and more accurate word,” rather than actor or actress? In philosophy he was a Hepburn, a Brando, a Dean, a Bacall, stars into whose souls he gave us entryways. I always thought of him and Hilary Putnam as the “glimmer twins.” Time was on their side, for so many decades, thank the lord. And on ours, too!

From Figures of Paradox to a Philosophy of Review

2020 ◽  
pp. 206-254
Author(s):  
Rebecca A. Sheehan
Keyword(s):  
Fractal Theory ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Incompleteness Theorem ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Zeno's Paradox

This chapter examines the role of paradox in the films and film theory of Ken Jacobs, Hollis Frampton, and Michael Snow. Paradoxes such as Zeno’s paradox, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, and Benoît Mandelbrot’s fractal theory of geometry, which inform the work of these filmmakers, propose and repeat the unresolvable gap between subject and world that informs skepticism. This chapter argues that the skeptical encounters these films invite, which entice the spectator to work toward solving a riddle or problem of incompleteness, also provide a model for overcoming skepticism by prompting re-encounters with the images on screen and the world to which they refer. These re-encounters occur in the same way that Stanley Cavell imagined the images of mainstream cinema could overcome problems of philosophical skepticism by drawing the subject closer to the world. The author argues, however, that these avant-garde meditations on mises en abyme are possibly more effective than Hollywood filmmaking for overcoming skepticism because of their more immediate emphasis on cinema’s very ability to engage and stage re-encounters between the subject and the limits of the world, rather than their reference to the world through images.

scholarly journals Stanley Cavell on the Magic of the Movies

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Romantic Love ◽  
The Other ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Worth Living ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
General Thesis ◽  
Human Value ◽  
Search For Self ◽  
Theoretical Hypothesis ◽  
The World

In order to explain Cavell's account of what makes movies so magical, this article will offer a chronological survey of his major writings on film, beginning with the first edition of The World Viewed (1971), where he poses an intriguing theoretical hypothesis about what distinguishes the movies from the other major art forms. The survey will continue by considering the expanded edition of The World Viewed (1979), Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1984), and Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (1997), and will conclude with an analysis of Cavell's discussion of Emersonian perfectionism in Cities of Words (2005). Throughout, I show how the specific film interpretations he proposes serve as archetypal examples of crucial features of his philosophy. Cavell's general thesis, I take it, is that films can pose particularly satisfying responses to the skepticism we all harbour about our most deeply held values. In a nutshell, the movies are magical because they tell us myths that allow us to see our lives as worth living, helping to restore our faith in the wellsprings of human value: romantic love, individual autonomy, nonconformity, and the search for self-improvement.

Introduction

Last Things ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacques Khalip
Keyword(s):  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
The World ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
End Of The World

The introduction begins with an essay by Kant in order to consider how the end of all things becomes linked to an end of thinking. It argues that Kant provides a way, in spite of himself, of considering the impossible limits of thought, life, and our world. Through readings of works by Hubert Robert, Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Stanley Cavell, and Tatsuo Miyajima, it theoretically stresses quieter and less emphatic ways of thinking the end of the world. It explores lastness as an unthinkable border of the human, and in turn, it reads the fate of romanticism (and romantic studies) within the key of the last.

The Disintegration of Sense and Bodies in Pain

2020 ◽  
pp. 113-128
Author(s):  
Madelyn Detloff ◽  
Gaile Pohlhaus
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
The Body ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Attention To Pain

In this essay, Detloff and Pohlhaus examine Virginia Woolf and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s writings on the precarious nature of sense and certainty as a counterpoint to Elaine Scarry’s analysis of the rhetoric of war in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. In her introduction, Scarry cites Virginia Woolf’s “On Being Ill” to exemplify a crucial premise of her argument about pain’s propensity to “bring[] about, even within the radius of several feet, this absolute split between one’s sense of one’s own reality and the reality of other persons” (4). “Whatever pain achieves,” Scarry argues, “it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language” (4). Through a more extensive analysis of “On Being Ill” than Scarry affords, along with a reading of Woolf’s later essay, “Craftsmanship,” Detloff and Pohlhaus illuminate a distinction between Woolf’s position and a central premise of Scarry’s theory –the presumed unsharability and near inexpressibility of pain. The essay argues that Woolf was not necessarily describing a fundamental incapacity of language to express pain, but rather a social practice of failing to attend to pain and therefore failing to develop the lexical tools to express the pain adequately. If this is the diagnosis, what is called for is a shift in attention (a shift in aspect perception, to follow Wittgenstein) from the inexpressibility of pain to our collective lack of attention to pain. Wittgenstein, himself a veteran of World War I who saw plenty of “bodies in pain” at the front, proposes a different view of the relationship between pain and knowing from Scarry. Following Stanley Cavell, Detloff and Pohlhaus understand the relation between the voice of the ordinary language philosopher and the skeptic in Wittgenstein’s Investigations to be neither dismissive, nor matter of fact. As Cavell notes, the ordinary language philosopher must take the skeptic seriously if she expects herself to be taken seriously and “In all cases [the] problem is to discover the specific plight of mind and circumstances within which a human being gives voice to [their] condition” (240). For this reason, Detloff and Pohlhaus approach the differences between Scarry, Woolf, and Wittgenstein not with the aim of proving one right over the other, but rather in order to find insight in the tension between them as a means to attend to and acknowledge others’ pain.

The Everyday, History, and Possibility

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
William H. Galperin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Being And Time ◽  
Possible World ◽  
Henri Lefebvre ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The World ◽  
Century Thought

Although the “everyday” has long been synonymous with malaise, anomie, and routine, the conditions surrounding its emergence in the romantic period, where it names a possible world that has been missed or overlooked, are recapitulated and extended in twentieth century thought. In the conceptual moves undertaken by Martin Heidegger in Being and Time and by Henri Lefebvre in his three-volume Critique of Everyday Life, the everyday is dependent, practically as well as dialectically, on an entrenched orientation typically associated with idealism, or with romanticism in its “standard” formation, that “being-in-the-world” (Heidegger) both predates and supersedes. A similar conception of the everyday obtains in the writings of political theorist Jane Bennett, whose sense of an enchanted materialism echoes both Lefebvre and philosopher Stanley Cavell in stressing the “extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and the everyday” and the larger assemblage to which we all belong.

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