The Holiday in His Eye

Stanley Cavell's Vision of Film and Philosophy

By William Rothman

Subjects: Film Studies, Aesthetics, Philosophy
Series: SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema
Hardcover : 9781438486055, 304 pages, October 2021
Paperback : 9781438486062, 304 pages, July 2022

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Table of contents

Preface

1. Cavell Reading Cavell

2. Introduction to Reading Cavell's "The World Viewed" (with Marian Keane)

3. Sights and Sounds (with Marian Keane)

4. The Acknowledgment of Silence (with Marian Keane)

5. Cavell's Philosophy and What Film Studies Calls "Theory"

6. Response to Vivian Sobchack's The Address of the Eye

7. Pursuits of Happiness: Cavell in Transition

8. In Defense of Pursuits of Happiness

9. Viewing the World in Black and White

10. Cavell's Creation

11. Nostalgia Ain't What It Used to Be

12. Cavell on Film, Television, and Opera (excerpts)

13. Cavell on Film: Introduction

14. The Same Again, Only a Little Different: Cavell's Two Takes on The Philadelphia Story

15. Cavell, Emerson, Hitchcock: Reflections Inspired by Stanley Cavell's Cities of Words

16. On Richard Allen's "Hitchcock and Cavell"

17. Introduction to Must We Kill the Thing We Love? Emersonian Perfectionism and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock

18. On Stanley Cavell's Band Wagon

19. "Excerpts from Memory": Autobiography, Film, and the Double Existence of Cavell's Philosophical Prose

20. Stanley Cavell, Victor Perkins, and the Personal

Afterword
Works Cited
Index

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.

Description

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 The Holiday in His Eye collects Rothman's writings about Cavell—many of them previously unpublished—to offer a lucid, serious introduction to and overview of Cavell's work, the influence of which has been somewhat limited by both the intrinsic difficulty of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.

William Rothman is Professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Miami. His many books include Tuitions and Intuitions: Essays at the Intersection of Film Criticism and Philosophy and Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, Second Edition, both also published by SUNY Press.