Understanding Cavell, Understanding Modernism

Explores and illuminates Stanley Cavell's profound impact on our understanding of literary modernism.

It has been widely recognized that Cavell’s focus on judgment and grammatical criteria establishes a close connection between our ability to speak and our capacity for aesthetic response. However, the connection between Cavell’s account of skepticism and his writings on modernist art and literature has received much less attention. This volume goes a long way towards correcting that imbalance.

The contributors to this volume offer an impressively deep exploration of one of Cavell’s central tasks, which was the renewal of philosophy. In the process, they show how modernism remains an essential, ongoing project, not bound by historical limits. The result is a book that goes beyond conventional understandings of Cavell and of modernism by getting at the heart of both.

Paola Marrati is Professor of Humanities and Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, USA. She is a member of the Scientific Board of the Center for the Study of French Contemporary Philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris, France. Her publications include Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy (2008) and Genesis and Trace: Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger (2005).