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

"Presents an original, insightful, and compelling vision of the trajectory of Cavell's oeuvre, one that takes his kinship with Emerson as inextricably bound up with his ever-deepening thinking about movies. 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 The Holiday in His Eye collects Rothman's writings about Cavell--many of them previously unpublished--to offer a lucid, serious introduction to and overview of Cavell's work, the influence of which has been somewhat limited by both the intrinsic difficulty of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. "-- Provided by publisher Contents 10 Preface 12 1 Cavell Reading Cavell 34 2 Introduction to Reading Cavell’s “The World Viewed” (with Marian Keane) 42 3 Sights and Sounds (with Marian Keane) 56 4 The Acknowledgment of Silence (with Marian Keane) 70 5 Cavell’s Philosophy and What Film Studies Calls “Theory” 92 Statement Read at Plenary Session of the 1991 Society for Cinema Studies Annual Meeting 97 6 Response to Vivian Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye 100 7 Pursuits of Happiness: Cavell in Transition 104 8 In Defense of Pursuits of Happiness 114 9 Viewing the World in Black and White 122 Now, Voyager 123 Stella Dallas 125 Blonde Venus 127 Show Boat 128 Imitation of Life 130 10 Cavell’s Creation 136 Who Is Stanley Cavell? 139 Who Is Cary Grant? 140 “Stella’s Taste” 141 11 Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used to Be 152 12 Cavell on Film, Television, and Opera (excerpts) 168 “The Fact of Television” 169 Contesting Tears 171 “Opera and the Lease of Voice” 179 “Opera in and as Film” 183 13 Cavell on Film: Introduction 186 14 The Same Again, Only a Little Different: Cavell’s Two Takes on The Philadelphia Story 200 15 Cavell, Emerson, Hitchcock: Reflections Inspired by Stanley Cavell’s Cities of Words 208 16 On Richard Allen’s “Hitchcock and Cavell” 220 17 Introduction to Must We Kill the Thing We Love? Emersonian Perfectionism and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock 236 18 On Stanley Cavell’s Band Wagon 250 Epilogue 267 19 “Excerpts from Memory”: Autobiography, Film, and the Double Existence of Cavell’s Philosophical Prose 274 20 Stanley Cavell, Victor Perkins, and the Personal 284 Afterword 290 Works Cited 294 Index 298