E-grāmata: Stanley Cavell and the Claim of Literature

This is an original and exciting book, true to Cavell's trailblazing work in the Emersonian categories both of instruction and of provocation. -- William Flesch, Brandeis University Engaging with Stanley Cavell's readings of Thoreau, Shakespeare, Beckett, Wordsworth, Poe, and Ibsen, David Rudrum shows that literary texts-for Cavell and for us-have a distinctive power to persist in their forms of questioning and thus to unsettle us persuasively. Yet in doing this they are also addressing and enacting the plights of subjects in worldly situations, not evaporating those situations into empty textual figures. Juxtaposing Cavell's practices of reading against those of structuralism, poststructuralism, New Historicism, psychoanalytic criticism, and New Textualism, among others, Rudrum traces how Cavell's critical writings, like other major writings, philosophical and literary alike, include 'an aesthetics of themselves,' so that in their densities of attention they demonstrate practices and possibilities of understanding the human as both constitutively incomplete and capable of productive attention. I cannot think of a better way of articulating the claim that literature makes on us. -- Richard Eldridge, Swarthmore College