Abstract
In an August 2004 entry in his philosophical memoir Little Did I Know, Stanley Cavell cites a complaint, by someone who had valued his earlier work, that in his just-published book Cities of Words he was “just going over the same old films.” Cavell felt provoked to write, “I never take up a film again that I care about unless I feel that I have something new to convey in considering it, which is part of my claim that the films I have studied are inexhaustible.” Focusing primarily on The Philadelphia Story, this paper will identify and assess what Cities of Words does convey about “the same old films” that goes beyond Pursuits of Happiness and reflect on its implications for thinking philosophically about film’s ways of thinking philosophically.
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Notes
- 1.
This essay was given as the keynote address at the ‘Cavell and Film’ Conference held at the Sorbonne in 2019.
References
Cavell, S. (1981). Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Harvard University Press.
Cavell, S. (1996). Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. The University of Chicago Press.
Cavell, S. (2002). Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge University Press. First Published 1969.
Cavell, S. (2005). Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life. Harvard University Press.
Cavell, S. (2010). Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory. Stanford University Press.
Fleming, R., & Payne, M. (Eds). (1989). The Senses of Stanley Cavell. Bucknell University Press.
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Rothman, W. (2023). The Same Again, Only a Little Different: Stanley Cavell’s Two Takes on The Philadelphia Story. In: Fox, C., Harrison, B. (eds) Philosophy of Film Without Theory. Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13654-2_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13654-2_12
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