The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema

David LaRocca is the author, editor, or coeditor of more than a dozen books. He edited Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind (Bloomsbury, 2021), Inheriting Stanley Cavell (Bloomsbury, 2020), a commemorative issue of Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies (2019), and Stanley Cavell’s Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes (2003). He has taught philosophy and cinema and held visiting research or teaching positions in the United States at Binghamton University, Cornell University, Harvard University, Ithaca College, the School of Visual Arts, the State University of New York College at Cortland, and Vanderbilt University.

Preface: Stanley Cavell and Cinema
Thomas Elsaesser, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Introduction: Philosophy’s Claim to Film, Film’s Claim to Philosophy
David LaRocca, Cornell University, USA

Part I. Underwriting and Overhearing: Reconceiving Cinematic Ontology and Genre

1. “Assertions in Technique”: Tracking the Medial “Thread” in Cavell’s Filmic Ontology
Garrett Stewart, University of Iowa, USA

2. Revisiting The World Viewed
Noël Carroll, Graduate Center of the City University of New York, USA

3. The World Heard
Kyle Stevens, Appalachian State University, USA

4. What a Genre of Film Might Be: Medium, Myth, and Morality
Stephen Mulhall, New College, Oxford University, UK

Part II. Interlude: Temperaments for Film

5. My Troubled Relationship with Stanley Cavell: In Pursuit of a Truly Cinematic Conversation
Scott MacDonald, Hamilton College, USA

6. Film as Film and the Personal
William Rothman, University of Miami, USA

Part III. Philosophy, as if Made for Film

7. Between Skepticism and Perfectionism: On Cavell’s Melodrama of the Unknown Woman
Robert Sinnerbrink, Macquarie University, Australia

8. Overcoming Skepticism in Casablanca
Thomas E. Wartenberg, Mount Holyoke College, USA

9. A Skeptic’s Reprieve: Cavell on Comedy in Shakespeare and the Movies
Lawrence F. Rhu, University of South Carolina, USA

Part IV. Film, as if Made for Philosophy

10. Film Exists in a State of Philosophy: Two Contemporary Cavellian Views
Shawn Loht, Baton Rouge Community College, USA

11. The Conception of Film for the Subject of Television: Moral Education of the Public and a Return to an Aesthetics of the Ordinary
Sandra Laugier, Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, France

12. On Film in Reality: Cavellian Reflections on Skepticism, Belief, and Documentary
Mathew Abbott, Federation University, Australia

13. On the Aesthetics of Amateur Filmmaking in Narrative Cinema: Negotiating Home Movies after Adam’s Rib
David LaRocca, Cornell University, USA

Acknowledgements
Index
Contributors