Overview

Cavell's Ontology of Film presents ten essays by some of the most prominent international scholars of Stanley Cavell's work with a double purpose: to look back, half a century after its original publication, at Cavell's now seminal film-philosophical book The World Viewed (1971, enlarged 1979), and to draw on its concepts to assess the world in the current age of digital media and climate change. The volume opens with a series of essays that revisit Cavell's discussion of film crucially including classical Hollywood movies in the context of modernism. Several authors consider whether this preoccupation with modernism in Cavell's early work ultimately (and anachronistically) gave way to an embrace of romanticism or whether Cavell conceives these frameworks as offering different responses to the persistent problem of skepticism. Others consider how popular filmmakers or film genres outside Hollywood might contribute to, or alter, Cavell's thoughts on the movies. Moreover, taking to heart that some of Cavell's main lines of thought are premised on the idea of film as an analog medium that projects and screens the world inside a theater, several contributions to this volume nevertheless project The World Viewed's concepts onto the future of our televisual and digital culture. The volume finally loops back to Cavell's discussion of modernism in The World Viewed so as to find the seeds of a Cavellian politics for the age of climate disaster. Thus, beyond celebrating the past through a collection of reviews and reflections on The World Viewed a book of 'ontological reflection' that themselves conceive the world on screen as 'a world past' the present volume is best understood as a series of Cavellian meditations on media and mediated relations to the world, sustained, in the wake of Cavell's own passing (2018), by an ongoing current of thought on the idea of temporality itself.

Full Product Details

9781839995149

Table of Contents

Reviews

“It is deeply ironic that Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed, which appeared 50 years ago, was misread and written off almost as soon as it was published. The fault was our own. This extraordinary collection of essays demonstrates convincingly that Cavell’s ‘little book’ was always a book of philosophy for tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. The authors of this beautiful book are finally showing us how to catch up today.” — D. N. Rodowick, Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the College and Division of Humanities, The University of Chicago, USA “The work of Stanley Cavell has experienced a well-deserved resurgence of appreciation and evaluation over the past 20 years. This superb collection continues that trend with a broad range of insightful and provocative essays which convincingly return Cavell to the cutting edge of film and media studies.” — Timothy Corrigan, Professor Emeritus of Cinema and Media Studies, Fisher-Bennett Hall, The University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA “This extraordinary collection of essays opens new possibilities of interpretations for Cavell’s groundbreaking philosophy of film book, The World Viewed. Moreover, it offers a second chance for its reception among philosophers, film scholars, and film fans. Gerrits and his co-authors offer a beautiful homage to the famous Harvard philosopher who invented new ways of writing on films from the perspective of his own experience, and who set a whole new program for philosophical skepticism in the face of films.” — Élise Domenach, Professor at the École Normale Supérieure Louis-Lumière, France These outstanding essays inherit Cavell’s groundbreaking The World Viewed in highly original ways. They persuasively demonstrate how profound changes in representation transform what can be meant by “viewing” and “world”, altering memory and experience itself. Reassessing modernism, they face this changing ontology and politics without denying its dangers but with a quiet affirmation, in different ways, of possibilities and of a politics to come. — Paul Standish, UCL Institute of Education

Author Information

Jeroen Gerrits is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Binghamton University (SUNY) and author of Cinematic Skepticism: Across Digital and Global Turns (2019).

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