Book Description
Reissued with a new preface, this famous collection of essays covers a remarkably wide range of philosophical issues, including essays on Wittgenstein, Austin, Kierkegaard, and the philosophy of language, and extending beyond philosophy into discussions of music and drama. Previous edition hb ISBN (1976): 0-521-21116-6 Previous edition pb ISBN (1976): 0-521-29048-1
Customer Reviews:
Stanley Cavell's Place in History.......2002-10-01
I've never met Professor Stanley Cavell, and though I've emailed him he has obviously been too busy to respond. Nevertheless, in my view, his books will be read long after many philosophers of the twentieth century are buried and forgotten. The reason can be summed up in a single word: insight. Rarely has there been a more perspicuous observer of motion pictures than Professor Cavell. To read his commentary on movies is to enhance one's movie-viewing experience. He sees things that no one else sees, he sees relations that are missed by others. My enjoyment of films has been substantially augmented by my reading of Professor Cavell's essays. He has opened a new dimension for me. I am less impressed by his infatuation with performatives in his book "Must We Mean What We Say?" but, to the extent that performatives opened for him a door to performances, it was an intellectual journey well worth undertaking. We are all his beneficiaries and all in his eternal debt.
Book Description
In this powerful, compassionate work, one of anthropology's most distinguished ethnographers weaves together rich fieldwork with a compelling critical analysis in a book that will surely make a signal contribution to contemporary thinking about violence and how it affects everyday life. Veena Das examines case studies including the extreme violence of the Partition of India in 1947 and the massacre of Sikhs in 1984 after the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. In a major departure from much anthropological inquiry, Das asks how this violence has entered "the recesses of the ordinary" instead of viewing it as an interruption of life to which we simply bear witness. Das engages with anthropological work on collective violence, rumor, sectarian conflict, new kinship, and state and bureaucracy as she embarks on a wide-ranging exploration of the relations among violence, gender, and subjectivity. Weaving anthropological and philosophical reflections on the ordinary into her analysis, Das points toward a new way of interpreting violence in societies and cultures around the globe. The book will be indispensable reading across disciplinary boundaries as we strive to better understand violence, especially as it is perpetrated against women.
Customer Reviews:
How bright I am.......2004-06-25
This book is not for filmgoers. Its focus is geared to the elite and erudite college student who will be impressed by name dropping of prominent philosophers in Western Lit. To be polite, it is dripping in stream-of-consciousness commentary that wreaks of self-indulgence, suggesting adult attention deficit problems. It is not uncommon to find sentences in excess of 50 words long, that if grammatically diagrammed would make Watson and Crick's double helix look like a straight arrow. Save time and save money. The clip art of movie scenes is primitive and should have been a clue as to the author's intent. A great disappointment.
A great book for lovers of classical American movies........1997-12-29
The goal of this book is to show that the classic American film comedies of the 30's and 40's are worthy of the best criticism. The author succeeds. If you love movies, and want to think about them seriously, this is your book. The films in it star Hepburn, Grant, Tracy, Gable, Stanwyck. This is a sophisticated book for a sophisticated film audience. The author is one of America's leading philosophers. Cavell brings his knowledge of concepts of friendship, conversation, gender, parenting, sexuality, fun, and adventure to bear on each of the romantic comedies he discusses. The genre explored here continues in GROUNDHOG DAY, FLIRTING WITH DISASTER, WHEN HARRY MET SALLY, SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE, ALL OF ME, JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO. This book is serious, and well worth it. It explores everything important to every romantic relationship. I highly recommend it to everyone.
A critical appreciation of film's greatest romantic comedies.......1996-05-18
Cavell identifies the "comedies of remarriage," those romantic comedies and comic romances that lit the screens and the hearts of the audiences of the 1930's and 40's. With the mind of a philosopher and scholar and the passionate appreciation of a true fan, he examines classic romantic comedies (and comic romances), including "The Lady Eve," "The Awful Truth," and "The Philadelphia Story." In a classical context (he compares the role of the woods in Shakespeare to the role of Connecticut in "Bringing Up Baby") he manages to illuminate the films without disturbing the gossamer that holds them together. The best that can be said is that he does justice to these lovely films, and makes us understand how smart we were to adore them
Book Description
This handsome new edition of Stanley Cavell's landmark text, first published 20 years ago, provides a new preface that discusses the reception and influence of his work, which occupies a unique niche between philosophy and literary studies.
Customer Reviews:
Can I ever know what he really thinks?.......2004-06-06
In an episode of a popular TV series, a female character tired of the obscurity in her relationship complains to her partner that, even though she can see his lips moving as he speaks, she can never know what he is really thinking. What is it that she is accusing him of, and is her complaint necessarily melodramatic? Stanley Cavell's long, difficult book on scepticisim and our knowledge of other people would be an excellent guide in considering this question and assessing its source in the dialogue as a philosophical text.
One answer might be that, to her mind, he is strenuously trying to hide something from her, with the result that the way he speaks draws her attention primarily to his efforts in stopping himself from saying what he would say spontaneously if it wasn't for the strain of attempted secrecy. Instead of simply attending to him as usual, without any interpretation, she finds herself inferring, from all kinds of bodily clues, that he is deliberately denying her access to his thoughts and feelings. If he wasn't trying to be so secretive and deceitful, she would see straightaway that his words were somehow aligned with his thoughts, and would have no reason to accuse him of wanting to mislead her. On this reading, there is nothing particularly melodramatic about the situation at hand - it is all just an ordinary anxiety about a lover's desire to avoid transparency.
But there might also be a second answer: she has lost all confidence in his words and actions ever revealing his thoughts. It isn't just that his face communicates something about him that she finds incompatible with what he is saying about his love for her; rather, it is that nothing he ever does could give her any reliable clues as to what goes on inside him: his mind and heart remain forever sealed off from her by his body. No matter what he says or does, none of these things ever express what she really wants to know - he is closed in on himself, inaccessible to her precisely where she would want most intimacy with him. Now this is an evidently melodramatic reading: it goes beyond the situation as described and precludes any chance of success for the lovers - it is not because of anything he does deliberately that he is hidden from her, it is just how human beings are doomed to relate to each other in mutual ignorance. But is it a real worry for anyone?
Stanley Cavell's book falls into four interconnected parts. The first part discusses the notion of a criterion - what is involved in saying that a given thing is called this or that, and how that sort of claim differs from saying that it is a real specimen of a particular kind. Cavell's guide here is the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations, and it is worth noting here how one person's thinking and writing can be an inexhaustible source of wonder and inspiration for another without turning them into a mere epigone. The second part concerns the idea that our fundamental relation to the world is one of knowledge - a view that holds a deep fascination for the philosopher but is nevertheless questioned as untrue to how human beings relate to things in the world. The third part concentrates on the place of rules in morality, whereas the fourth is a collection of essays, with rather unclear boundaries, on the temptation to think that our fellow human beings are not really human. A self-reflective book easy to get lost in - in more than one way.
Living our skepticism.......2003-12-13
The entirety of Cavell's work arranges itself around _The Claim of Reason_, a 564pp book that was extraordinarily long in its gestation (over two decades), as it grew out of his thesis on Wittgenstein into a much stranger shape. In Cavell's inimitable self-citing way, since its publication he's rarely written anything that doesn't refer back to _The Claim of Reason_.
I'm not going to summarize it here. Its basic burden ("burden" is a word Cavell likes to use--think of it in both senses, as both "weight" & "refrain") is an effort to grapple with the Western epistemological tradition, & to suggest that it contains a major blind spot. Post-Cartesian philosophy has been preoccupied with skepticism about the possibility of proving the accuracy of our knowledge about or, or even the existence of, the material world. Cavell is interested in this skepticism for two reasons: (1) its ultimate unanswerability; (2) the curious evanescence of its conclusions: as Hume notes, once one leaves the study & goes out into the real world of social interaction & daily concerns, the skeptical conclusion evaporates, looks "cold & strained". Cavell then traces out another kind of skepticism: the problem of the existence of other minds, or more generally the question of our knowledge of others. In Cavell's view, other-minds skepticism "makes sense" in a way that material-world skepticism does not: or rather, it is "live" in our everyday interactions (it's not news to anyone that we have only glimpses of the inner being of others). In other words, with the problem of other minds, "we live our skepticism" (the four-word formula which the entire book builds up to).
This is a neat opposition which Cavell admits is itself somewhat unstable. But it leads him to suggest that the history of Western & in particular post-Cartesian philosophy has been a history of ignoring the problem of the other; for Cavell it is a concern that has been instead most deeply grappled with in literature. The book concludes with a sketch of four of what he takes to be the most fruitful ways philosophy could develop a history of the problem of the other; & with readings of _The Merchant of Venice_, _The Winter's Tale_ & (in particular) _Othello_ as dramas of other-minds skepticism.
As you'll see I've approached the book, so to speak, from the back-end: it takes quite some time before these larger themes are fully set forth. The opening sections take on several different thinkers (Rawls, Austin) but are largely an exposition of Cavell's reading of Wittgenstein's _Philosophical Investigations_. The key move here is his case that Wittgenstein's notion of "criteria" has been misunderstood by most of Wittgenstein's readers: Cavell (to my mind persuasively) argues that Wittgenstein did not conceive of criteria as criteria for (proof of) something's _existence_; but that instead they are criteria of _meaning_: of what makes something "count as", identifiable as something.
This is the kind of book which is, simply, too full for any single reading: it's as much a sourcebook as it is a sustained argument, & I can see why Cavell continues to use it as such. There are elements I wish he had extended further. For instance, I find myself desiring that Cavell had taken time to spell out, not just the distinction/interrelation between material-world skepticism & other-minds skepticism, but also between material-world skepticism & scientific knowledge & practice, as forms of thinking that both contradict what we "know" about the world in everyday life. (What I'm getting at is: in the "skeptical recital", as Cavell puts it, the exchange runs something like: "How do you know this envelope on this table exists?" "By means of my senses." Then: "But could you not be deceived by a clever trickster? "Couldn't you be hallucinating or dreaming?" or "But you can't see the _other_ side of the envelope." &c. But what if instead the speaker pointed out the disparity between the data give by the senses, & the way that the world is conceived of in the modern atomic theory for instance? What distinguishes this kind of cognitive dissonance from skepticism?) This is not a criticism, exactly--obvious Cavell has different fish to fry--but it seems an odd omission given the book's interest in Romanticism, which on my understanding is in part a response to science's disenchantment of the world (Keats complaining about optical science's ruining the charm of the rainbow, &c). Cavell's discussion of our disappointment with knowledge would have been richer, I think, if it had touched on this other area.
A last word on the style of the book, which I might describe as "companionable". The book is not without its miry spots, but on the whole it's an enjoyable, rather friendly read, with a lot of interesting eddies of internal dialogue (like Wittgenstein, Cavell likes to introduce imaginary interlocutors). The more tortuous (Henry) Jamesian style of later Cavell is only rarely in evidence, perhaps because so much of the book derives from his early dissertation (though obviously extensively reworked). For all the sheer unruliness of the book's structure, it's the kind of book that stays with you, a touchstone & resource.
The Claim of Reason.......2002-12-11
Professor Cavell's exploration of Wittgenstein's writings, skepticism and the drama of tragedy is itself a long journey for the reader. I think that the philosophic re-enactman of Wiggenstein's philosophical thoughts, and the analysis of skepticism as a theme of tragedy of the doubting self may elude the non-philosophic reader, but once the reader gets it, it is worth these few hundreds of pages.
The belles lettres tradition at its best.......2002-08-11
I recommend this book to anyone who, like me, is in love with ideas but cannot figure out why anyone would bother to read the dry, technical, specialized prose of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy OR the windy, pseudo-profound, obscurantist convolutions of European postmodernism. I came to this book from Cavell's brilliant volume on screwball comedy, "Pursuits of Happiness," which treated Golden Age American cinema with the
intellectual and aesthetic seriousness it deserves without ever
straying from an essential love of the films. "The Claim of Reason" was a difficult read (I was 20 when I read it and had never read an entire book of philosophy): Cavell can be windy and obscurantist himself, yet there is also something beguilingly sensual about his prose (a little like Henry James), and even when one is not the least bit sure that one fully understands him, one is inexorably led on because the book, unlike any other modern philosophy I am aware of, treats philosophical problems as though they have meaning for the deepest concerns of one's daily life, and vice versa. Cavell also, throughout his writings, treats morality as being of urgent concern, without ever relying on platitudes...
Cavell's Opus.......2001-06-07
Despite "long sentences," this book is an essential and personal Auseinandersetzung with philosophical issues ranging from Skepticism (of the world, of other minds), rule-following, common-sense knowledge, ordinary language philosophy, essentialism, foundationalism and much more. Cavell articulates a very particular and unorthodox interpretation of Wittgenstein, making use of his methodology, his examples and characterizations of ordinary, everyday problems by taking his 'philosophical intentions' to be essentially 'therapuetic' as opposed to 'constructive.' This is something Cavell has in common with both McDowell and Rorty though his hopes and desires for philosophy go beyond a simple critique of culture and beyond 'vocabulary changes' (Rorty) to include positive attempts to embody a philosophy that can live with the age old problems (of skepticism, the mind-body problem) that has plagued it for thousands of years. Though there are no end-all solutions to these problems, he believes, there is also no way to avoid grappling with them. The Claim of Reason is an attempt to embody and exemplify this belief by confronting traditional epistemology as well as the Wittgensteinian and Austinian methods of coming to terms with it. (Other reading sympathetic to this line of thought can be found in 'the new wittgenstein' eds. Alice Crary & Rupert Read)
Book Description
Reissued with a new preface and a new essay on Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, Coriolanius, Hamlet and The Winter's Tale, this famous collection of essays on Shakespeare's tragedies considers the plays as responses to the crisis of knowledge and the emergence of modern skepticism.
Customer Reviews:
Disowning Knowledge.......2000-04-15
This is a wonderful way to become acquainted with the thought of Stanley Cavell--one of the most important living philosophers in America. The essays on Shakespeare are stunning, and one can feel the force of a restless, moral, rigorous mind at work in every turn of the arguments. Some of these essays are collected from earlier publications, but the reprinting of all his essays on Shakespeare, plus some new work, make it very worth owning!
Book Description
This volume gathers and annotates all of the Shakespeare criticism, including previously unpublished lectures and notes, by the maverick American intellectual Kenneth Burke. Burke's interpretations of Shakespeare have influenced important lines of contemporary scholarship; playwrights and directors have been stirred by his dramaturgical investigations; and many readers outside academia have enjoyed his ingenious dissections of what makes a play function. Burke's intellectual project continually engaged with Shakespeare's works, and Burke's writings on Shakespeare, in turn, have had an immense impact on generations of readers. Carefully edited and annotated, with helpful cross-references, Burke's fascinating interpretations of Shakespeare remain challenging, provocative, and accessible. Read together, these pieces form an evolving argument about the nature of Shakespeare's artistry. Included are thirteen analyses of individual plays and poems, an introductory lecture explaining his approach to reading Shakespeare, and a comprehensive appendix of scores of Burke's other references to Shakespeare. The editor, Scott L. Newstok, also provides a historical introduction and an account of Burke's legacy. This edition fulfils Burke's own vision of collecting in one volume his Shakespeare criticism, portions of which had appeared in the many books he had published throughout his lengthy career. Here, Burke examines Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar, Venus and Adonis, Othello, Timon of Athens, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, King Lear, Troilus and Cressida, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, Falstaff, the Sonnets, and Shakespeare's imagery. KENNETH BURKE (1897-1993) was the author of many books, including the landmark Motivorum trilogy: A Grammar of Motives (1945), A Rhetoric of Motives (1950), and Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950-1955 (2007). He has been hailed as one of the most original American thinkers of the twentieth century and possibly the greatest rhetorician since Cicero. Burke's enduring familiarity with Shakespeare helped shape his own theory of dramatism, an ambitious elaboration of the "all the world's a stage" conceit. Burke is renowned for his far-reaching 1951 essay on Othello, which wrestles with concerns still relevant to scholars more than half a century later; his imaginative ventriloquism of Mark Antony's address over Caesar's body has likewise found a number of appreciative readers, as have his many other essays on the playwright. SCOTT L. NEWSTOK is Assistant Professor of English at Gustavus Adolphus College and Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University.
Customer Reviews:
Burke on the Bard.......2007-05-18
All of Kenneth Burke's writings on Shakespeare have been assembled in one place in this book, and even a compendium of brief mentions of Shakespeare, through the assiduous efforts of Scott Newstok. And what a treasure trove it is. As an undergraduate, I remember working my way diligently through Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives and A Grammar of Motives and being dazzled by the breadth and depth of this man's thinking. I thought I might have to dust off these volumes in order to approach this collection, but I did not find that necessary. The work stands solidly on its own, touching on Burke's dramatistic analytical approach, but not requiring any special knowledge beyond the scope of the essays themselves. Burke is quirky, and though he has a definite critical system, he is not essentially systematic. These essays range widely, both individually and as a collection. For the Shakespeare scholar, each one is a gem worthy of contemplation; for the neophyte or undergrad, this is a fine book to read piecemeal, on a "need-to-know basis."
From a scholarly perspective, I am most struck by the prescient sensibility of Burke's thinking. His work seems to percolate up through the current generation of literary critics, largely latent and unacknowledged, but there for the perceptive reader to discern. In places a Marxist perspective emerges, as in brief discussions of the enclosure acts, calling to mind H. R. Coursen's The Leasing Out of England: Shakespeare's Second Henriad. Yet Burke is no doctrinaire Marxist. Elsewhere, insightful psychological approaches both to characters and to the audience's experience of the play emerge. But there is no Procrustean psychological deformation of the works. Most markedly, Burke seems to anticipate many of the new-historical perspectives so prevalent today. In Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World and James Shapiro's A Year in the Life of Shakespeare: 1599, I hear echoes of Burke. Though best known as a rhetorical analyst, the scope of Burke's critical project is made clear in his work on Shakespeare.
For anyone who finds the previous paragraph "inside baseball," do not lose hope. This book is ideal for the beginning and intermediate Shakespeare student as well. Burke's treatment of Julius Caesar, Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear will provide any student of the Bard's tragedies with fresh perspectives and unique insights into Shakepeare's tragic vision. The essay on Caesar is especially illustrative of the uniqueness of the Burkean approach. In the essay, "Antony in Behalf of the Play," Burke gives a meta-dramatic view of the play through the persona of Marc Antony, exploring the motives of the characters, the playwright, the audience within the play (the crowd), and the audience of the play. "Psychology and Form," the essay on Hamlet, ranges far and wide, offering insight into Burke's extensive knowledge and synoptic approach to literature. Here, he develops a theory of the development and resolution of psychological expectations in an audience and compares this to the listener's expectation of resolution in music (the condition to which all art aspires, as Walter Pater memorably put it).
Burke is a great thinker and a gifted writer. This book does an invaluable service by assembling all of his writing on the greatest writer in English in one place. This is a book that will be treasured by the expert and can teach the student to treasure Shakespeare's work. It is highly recommended.
The title says it all: Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare.......2007-05-09
My introduction to Kenneth Burke was a classmate in graduate school whose enthusiasm was such that we were going to get him a t-shirt to wear to bars that said, "At my first mention of Kenneth Burke, stop serving me." Exposed to different theories of human communication it was Burke's dramatistic approach that appealed to me the most. It is simplistic to say that Burke provides a synthesis of Marx and Freud, but it does suggest the level of his critical thinking, the extent to which it speaks to the human condition, and the reason to despair that he is not considered the equal of that particular pair, especially since he work on rhetoric and aesthetics has more contemporary value. "Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare" gathers and annotates all of Burke's thoughts on Shakespeare, including previously unpublished notes and lectures. The result is not as epic as Harold Bloom's ""Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human," but just as insightful on its own terms. You will learn more about the Bard, but probably even more about Burke, which might be even better.
For me the most important essay by Burke has always been "The Rhetoric of Hitler's Battle," because of the way in which his critique of "Mein Kampf" exposed Hitler as a psychopathic snake oil salesman committed to escalating violence as a means to ignoble ends. However, his essay I have used the most in classes has been "Antony in Behalf of the Play," Burke's critique of "Julius Caesar" that is the third essay collected here. It is a stellar example of synchronic analysis, as Burke looks at how Antony's celebrated funeral oration worked upon Shakespeare's Elizabethan audience, showing how the Bard dictates the reactions of the playgoers almost as precisely as he scripts those of the Roman mob on the stage. Burke pays as much attention to syllables as he does to psychology and works out the dynamic of one of the great scenes (and speeches) of all time. The other dozen essays (nee chapters) collected here include his look at "Hamlet" to develop the relationship between "Psychology and Form" and "'Othello': An Essay to Illustrate a Method," along with looks at "Twelfth Night," "Venus and Adonis," "Timon of Athens," "Antony and Cleopatra," "Coriolanus," "King Lear," "Troilus and Cressida," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and his notes on "Macbeth."
The Editor's Introduction, "Renewing Kenneth Burke's 'plea for the Shakespearean drama,'" is designed to "prove a series of entry-points" to Burke's work and prove "a recursive gathering of different perspectives on what exactly makes his Shakespearean meditations so (demandingly) reward." Following the essays a lengthy Appendix provides a look at "Additional References to Shakespeare in Burke's Writing." This goes all the way back to quoting Flaubert that Shakespeare was "not a man, but a continent," included in the 1921 essay "Three Adepts of 'Pure' Literature" that was republished in "Counter-Statement," and ends with references to "Troilus and Cressida" and "Othello" as examples of the manifestations of the "hierarchal" motive, taken from a 1955 essay published this year in "Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950-1955." The excerpts show Shakespeare was a recurring touchstone in Burke's writing, and also give an indication of the scope of his intellectual grasp.
The story I heard was that Burke dropped out of Columbia University and continued his education by reading everything in the New York Public Library. Certainly this tale is apocryphal, but it is easy enough to believe when you read Burke and he gets going. The lecture that Burke delivered entitled "Shakespeare Was What?", which serves as the introduction to the 13 essays that make up the main part of this volume, not only references over a dozen Shakespeare plays but also works in Aristotle's' "Poetics," the British mathematician George Boole, "The New Criticism" of John Crowe Ransom, a poem by Henry Rago, the German word "Geworfenheit," and sundry other points of reference for his thinking. When you read Burke there will always come a point where his examples will leave you in the dust and send you to your library (or the Internet) scrambling to find a clue so you can try and get back on the same page.
When Daniel Webster gave his last great speech during the Senate debate on the Compromise of 1850, his introduction asked his audience to "Hear me for my cause." Apparently he assumed that most Americans, or at least most educated Americans, would recognize the quote from Brutus' funeral oration in "Julius Caesar," and therefore appreciate the deep sense of irony involved in its usage. I shudder to think of how few Americans today would recognize the quote, but when it comes to keeping up with Burke's encyclopedic knowledge I cannot imagine anyone can really keep up. That is why it is helpful that the essays and excerpts in this book are essentially annotated. Footnotes are reserved primarily by Burke's omissions from each work, the result of having access to the original manuscripts in preparing this edition, while the annotations that make up for the educational gap between Burke and his readers are provided as Notes following the book's Appendix. My preference would have been for the notes to be footnotes, but then I like annotated works as opposed to edited ones. Those who come to this volume looking for Burkeian insights into a particular play will find an Index of Works by Shakespeare before the book's regular Index; there is no breakdown of particular elements play by play, but that will simply compel you to flip through most of the book.
A well-writen editorial on a challenging topic.......2007-04-15
It is interesting that another reviewer found the book narrow as I found myself overwhelmed at first by the breadth. Really, can one edit a volume on Kenneth Burke and produce a simple overview? Even if Professor Newstock had chosen to cover Burke's writings on the Bible, I would guess the material available would have been difficult to summarize for a general audience.
I come from a family that waits each year with eyes fixed on the horizon for the latest Shakespeare books. I was very excited to receive this book in the mail and devoured the lengthy introduction the first day. (Then, I re-read it the second day, because I felt I missed some key points.) I admit that I had never read Kenneth Burke before I came across Newstock's edition. For an outsider, I found the book academic, but readable to a non-specialist. I felt I was able to develop a sense of the rogue Burke from the rich editorial comments. Rather than a dry, chronological biography with clichéd references to Burke's key themes on drama and character development, this book provides a multi-faceted approach to deciphering both Burke the critic and his writings. I felt myself transported through the twentieth century, watching Shakespeare studies evolve (and devolve) through Burke's essays and rebuttals to his work.
Newstock performed an amazing feat by making Burke accessible and relevant without resorting to thinly-veiled hero worship. Because Burke himself seems to have moved through the canon in a nonsystematic approach, shifting narrative and thesis with each essay, I would think it would be hard to edit a coherent volume on his Shakespeare writings. This is where I found the book most valuable, and Newstock's knowledge of the subject matter and crisp writing style most apparent. This is a real edited volume and I recommend it to readers like myself who are not familiar with Kenneth Burke but want to continue their scholarship of Shakespeare and his prime critics. This volume is not narrow but rather rich and expressive and quite readable and enjoyable. It became this year's book present among our family.
A very original investigation of Shakespeare's art.......2007-04-01
Kenneth Burke, the great American literary critic and intellectual, has a very original approach to Shakespeare. He takes an anthropological perspective, paying close attention to tragedy's origins in sacrificial ritual. He asks, for example, how and why the tragic protagonist's death is justified for the audience. His approach can also be characterized as rhetorical; he's very interested in the effects of a play in an audience, and how Shakespeare crafts his plays in order to create certain effects. Basically his approach is eclectic: he was also influenced by Freud and Marx (although he criticizes the limitations of both thinkers) and discusses historical and class issues. For example, his essay on Coriolanus discusses the play as a response to the enclosure acts and resulting riots in the early 17th century in England. Coriolanus doesn't fit the traditional tragic paradigm in interesting ways, and Burke discusses Coriolanus as a "grotesque tragedy" and both Coriolanus and Timons of Athens as "scurrilous" heros. Obviously his ideas are hard to summarize.
Burke was not apparently a professional academic (although he held various temporary teaching positions), so he is refreshingly free from critical dogmas. He's very interested in method: there's always a metacritical dimension to his writing, as he reflects not just on the play but also on his critical approach to the play or work. He has a great respect for the actual text of the dramatic work as it was crafted by a writer, performed by an acting company, and received by an audience. I like that he doesn't try to force the work into some critical straightjacket. In his concern for the underlying structure of a work, he could be characterized as a proto-structuralist, although a humanist structuralist, if that is not a contradiction in terms. His style reminds me of Montaigne, the great Renaissance French essayist. Rather than starting with a sharp thesis, he patiently explores the meaning of a work in all its contradictions.
This book includes essays on Hamlet, 12th Night, Julius Caesar, Venus and Adonis, Othello, Timons, Antony & Cleopatra, Coriolanus, King Lear, Troilus and Cressida, A Midsummer's Night Dream, and Macbeth. The essays are collected from various books and articles from Burke's writing career. This book is recommended for anyone who is intellectually curious and interested in Shakespeare's dramatic art.
An indispensable companion to Kenneth Burke.......2007-04-01
This book is extremely interesting because it collects what can be considered as all Kenneth Burke's writings on Shakespeare. This single fact makes this book an indispensable source of information if you are interested both in Kenneth Burke and Shakespeare. What's more the editing is very careful and rich because the editor systematically adds, in his notes, the variants and cut off passages of these texts that you could not find in standard editions. His end-notes provide you with all translations of foreign phrases and the references of all books or quotations in Kenneth Burke's text. All that makes the book easy to use and rich. Kenneth Burke was an essential character in criticism (he started with music and then moved to textual works), but also beyond this an essential actor in the definition and setting up of post-modernism. He was one of the best as for deconstructing received ideas or texts and reconstructing them along an open line that was also extremely original. So you may have great expectations when entering this volume. But do not push your expectations too far. Strangely enough all these studies, articles, monographs or notes, apart from a very few side remarks, are dealing with only the dramatic approach of the plays, hence with one side of Kenneth Burke's contributions, i.e. dramatism. Kenneth Burke considered that Shakespeare's plays were to be dealt with only from this point of view because they were fundamentally dramas. It is well-done, open-minded and open-ended, definitely deconstructing (post-modern critics may say today queering) some received ideas. But why did Kenneth Burke not use the clustering method he advocates in other books and particularly when he studies religious texts like Genesis or Saint Augustine. Here he does not deal with Shakespeare's poetry, his music that develops on a basic binary - iambic - equilibrium systematically disturbed by the ternary rhythm of the inconstant moon or the thrice-crowned goddess. that can unite Hecate, Selene, and Diana under one head, death and life, night and day, moon and sun, all of these together. He would have discovered that starting with sounds and rhythm Shakespeare moves to words, syntax, images, semantics, symbols and even more cabalistic numbers that can unite and identify a play. Richard III is nine. Antony and Cleopatra is eleven, etc. In other words he misses the stylistic grammar of the very language of the play that supports and even inspires the dramatic architecture. Why did not Kenneth Burke use his own concept of "grammar" to approach Shakespeare's style? Because probably he was only interested in the dramatic side of the plays. So, though this book under review is essential, we definitely have to get into Burke's other books, particularly when he deals with logology, the grammar of motives or the Rhetoric of Motives. It might also be necessary to widen the scope to understand how Kenneth Burke is a keystone in the vault of modern and post-modern thinking, he who never had a stable permanent university position, though he got his work through nicely. But he might have been more productive if he had had the chance to be on a campus for twenty years. The hunting for publishers and the small format of articles in journals would have become marginal, which it was not in his own time.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne
Book Description
Stanley Cavell has been one of the most creative and independent of contemporary philosophical voices. At the core of his thought is the view that skepticism is not a theoretical position to be refuted by philosophical theory but is a reflection of the fundamental limits of human knowledge of the self, of others and of the external world that must be accepted. This volume is the first attempt systematically and accessibly to describe and assess the full range of Cavell's work. There are new accounts of Cavell's contribution to the philosophy of mind and language, the theory of action, ethics, aesthetics, Romanticism, American philosophy. Richard Eldridge is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philsophy Department at Swarthmore College. He is author of The Persistence of Romanticism (Cambridge, 2001), On Moral Personhood: Philosophy, Literature, Criticism, and Self-Understanding (Chicago, 1989) and Leading a Human Life: Wittengenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism (Chicago, 1997), which won the 1998 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Book Prize awarded by the American Conference on Romanticism. He is the editor of Beyond Representation: Philosophy and Poetic Imagination (Cambridge, 1996).
Download Description
Contemporary Philosophy in Focus offers a series of introductory volumes on many of the dominant philosophical thinkers of the current age. Stanley Cavell has been one of the most creative and independent of contemporary philosophical voices. At the core of his thought is the view that skepticism is not a theoretical position to be refuted by philosophical theory but is a reflection of the fundamental limits of human knowledge of the self, of others and of the external world that must be accepted. This volume is the first attempt systematically and accessibly to describe and assess the full range of Cavell's work. There are new accounts of Cavell's contribution to the philosophy of mind and language, the theory of action, ethics, aesthetics, Romanticism, American philosophy, Shakespeare, and film and opera. Outside philosophy the appeal of this volume will be unusually broad.
Book Description
In the name of efficiency, the practice of education has come to be dominated by neoliberal ideology andprocedures of standardization and quantification. Such attempts to make all aspects of practice transparent and subject to systematic accounting lack sensitivity to the invisible and the silent, to something in the humancondition that cannot readily be expressed in an either-or form. Seeking alternatives to such trends, Saito readsDewey's idea of progressive education through the lens of Emersonian moral perfectionism (to borrow a term coined by Stanley Cavell). She elucidates a spiritual and aesthetic dimension to Dewey's notion of growth, one considerably richer than what Dewey alone presents in his typically scientific terminology.
Book Description
Stanley Cavell is a leading figure in American philosophy and one of the most exhilarating and wide-ranging intellectuals of our time. In this book Espen Hammer offers a lucid and thorough account of the development of Cavell's work, from his early writings on ordinary language philosophy and skepticism to his most recent contributions to film studies, literary theory, romanticism, ethics, and politics. The book traces the many lines of skepticism occurring in Cavell's work and shows how they amount to a rich and subtle picture of human subjectivity. Hammer explores Cavell's passionate engagement with Austin and Wittgenstein's visions of language, and his uncovering of conceptions of the ordinary in Emerson and Thoreau. Central sections of the book are devoted to the tragic and the comic as these modes of existence come into play in Shakespeare and Hollywood cinematic drama. In elaborating Cavell's responses to thinkers such as Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida, the author situates Cavell's writing within the wider context of contemporary continental philosophy. Hammer clearly reveals the existential dimensions of Cavell's thought. He argues that his variant of ordinary language philosophy is a vital stimulus to self-transformation in cognitive, aesthetic, ethical, and political domains, contributing significantly to a rethinking of issues such as responsibility and autonomy, and the relationship between philosophy and literature. A critical introduction to the thought of an inordinately complex writer, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars in philosophy, literary theory, cultural theory, comparative literature, and media and cultural studies.
Customer Reviews:
The bias of prejudice.......2006-07-17
Cavell relies on his own experience of cinema in such a way that the reader is invited to try to find himself with respect to his claims. There may or may not be a meeting of the minds. But this doesn't mean Cavell is biased. He's simply calling it as he sees it. He asks nothing more and nothing less of us. I don't see that a personal judgment might not be objective. And if it is very difficult to experience what Cavell is gesturing towards, that seems like all the more reason for being cautious when referring to what you might wrongly be calling "subjective prejudices." This book is worth the hard work.
Creative but Prejudiced.......2000-05-08
Since Stanley Cavell was an esteemed philosophy professor at Harvard University, when he wrote this book, it was a boon for film theorists everywhere; the academic elite were finally taking film theory seriously. However, even though in the book there are great moments of insight into the spectatorship of films, Cavell is very biased towards his own cinematic experience and will often make broad claims to the superiority of the classic films with which he grew up over any recent film. His predilections are often purely personal and do not involve an objective understanding of the films. The book contains many wonderful moments that stem from a thought-provoking philosopher yet it is very difficult to experience them through the author's subjective prejudices.
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- Reality Is What You Can Get Away With
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- Rollback (Sci Fi Essential Books)
Books Index
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General
| Criticism & Theory
| History & Criticism
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy
Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow
In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism
The Senses of Walden: An Expanded Edition
The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Enlarged Edition
