Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind

Description

In Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind, some of the scholars who have become essential for our understanding of Stanley Cavell's writing on film gather to use his landmark contributions to help us read new films-from Hollywood and elsewhere-that exist beyond his immediate reach and reading. In extending the scope of Cavell's film philosophy, we naturally find ourselves contending with it and amending it, as the case may be. Through a series of interpretive vignettes, the group effort situates, for the expert and novitiate alike, how Cavell's writing on film can profitably enrich one's experience of cinema generally and also inform how we might continue the practice of serious philosophical criticism of specific films mindful of his sensibility. The resulting conversations between texts, traditions, disciplines, genres, and generations creates propitious conditions for discovering what it means to watch and listen to movies with Stanley Cavell in mind.

DAVID LAROCCA is the author, editor, or coeditor of a dozen books. He edited The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema, a commemorative issue of Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies, Inheriting Stanley Cavell, and Stanley Cavell's Emerson's Transcendental Etudes. He has taught philosophy and cinema and held visiting research and teaching positions at Binghamton, Cornell, Cortland, Harvard, Ithaca College, the School of Visual Arts, and Vanderbilt. www.DavidLaRocca.org

This volume pushes Cavellian scholarship forward, showing that the value of Cavell's work lies not simply in understanding it but in applying it. By extending the philosopher's methods to an exciting range of international and contemporary films, the chapters compose a timely consideration on what it is to read a film, and to read a film generously. * Kyle Stevens, Assistant Professor of Film Studies, Appalachian State University, USA * Stanley Cavell is, to my mind, the best thinker for helping us account for the power of the film experience, and the fourteen chapters collected here provide ample reason for understanding the importance of Cavell for the study of film. All of the contributors to this wonderful, collective enterprise-brought together by David LaRocca-have in a similar way encountered him and his work. Whether they are revisiting films Cavell loved or taking up the invitation to explore new films, they reveal the importance of Cavell's writing and method. * Sandra Laugier, Professor of Philosophy, Universite Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, France *