Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies: Consequences of Skepticism (review)

Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies: Consequences of Skepticism marks a fruition of the available criticism on Cavell's relation to literary studies. It conveys the sense of a thorough assimilation of Cavell's project that reflects a deep—and sometimes long—acquaintance with it on the part of many of the contributors. The volume was put together in tandem with a conference at Harvard University to celebrate the publication of Cavell's memoirs in 2010, and is the first set of essays to have been published since then. The retrospective, personal tone of that event seems a fitting context for the initial showcasing of this collection, which manages to convey a tangible community of interest. This volume is specialized but accessible, and evinces a real companionship of endeavor without being protective or exclusive. More in the spirit of Cavell's work than to the letter of it, this companionship permits disagreement, divergence of opinion, and even critique. Such an attitude is a better compliment than reverence, showing both seriousness of engagement and, for some, true intellectual influence.

The editors do not aim to secure a method or consolidate the boundaries of a field, but attempt, in the Wittgensteinian-Cavellian tradition, to open a way, and to indicate means of going on. Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies is a reflexive undertaking. As well as raising questions about Cavell's reception in literary studies to date, it is concerned with the nature of literary studies itself. Outside the particular field represented here, which is best established in the United States, responses to Cavell from the disciplines of literary criticism and theory have been mixed. As Richard Eldridge and Bernard Rhie point out in their introductory essay, the reasons for this stem in part from uneasiness about what is perceived variously to be Cavell's naivety, conservatism, or sentimentality. Cavell's deliberate refusal of irony, his humanism, his "critical phenomenology," and his conscious embrace of an achieved modality of faith or hopefulness have seemed outdated to some, if not politically suspect. However, as Eldridge and Rhie show, this reaction is to some extent founded on misprisions about the nature of the "ordinary" expressed in the idea of "ordinary language," and on a more general resistance among literary critics to the normative, consensus-oriented approach associated with the procedures of analytic philosophy. The way that conceptions of America inflect Cavell's project is not stressed here, but it has perhaps been another source of resistance.

Eldridge and Rhie suggest that Cavell's example demonstrates possibilities that are rather less fixed, and less totalizing in their claims, than the work of Continental European thinkers on aesthetics such as Derrida and Deleuze. Their introduction also hints that we may be entering a post-theory moment, a turning back from the practice of skepticism (defined here as "the wish to transcend the human" [5]) toward finding ways of thinking about the communal and community that are situated, embodied, and contextual. Moving away from oppositions between philosophy and literature, this collection proposes criticism itself to be specific, taking place in relation to the aspirations of both. As such, criticism would not be separate from theorizing, or reception from further reflection—a broadly Cavellian stance. The volume is structured in two halves: a more theoretical first section, and a second part emphasizing practices, though the editors advise us to interpret the division as permeable.

For many of the participating authors, addressing Cavell's place (or its absence) in literary studies involves thinking through the stakes of their own discipline. Terms and ideas central to Cavell's project recur—trust, authority, interest, expression, experience—not only because they are his themes, but because they are already associated with the particularity of what literature does, or permits. The stakes that emerge for the contributors are high: whether the ethical should hold sway over the aesthetic (a concern of Charles Altieri in his essay), what the aesthetic function is, and how it expresses art's connection to life...