Stanley Cavell and the Claim of Literature

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, let me begin by thanking everyone at the Johns Hopkins University Press, in particular Matt McAdam for taking an interest in this project and for his invaluable support. It is equally important to thank my colleagues and my students at the University of Huddersfield. The full extent of my gratitude to them is, in fact, easily quantified: they afforded me the priceless opportunity of a semester of sabbatical leave, during which the introduction, chapters 2 and 7, and most of the conclusionwerewritten .Withoutit,if Ihavedonemysums right, abouttwo-thirds of the pages in this book would yet be unwritten. Intellectual debts, however, are harder to measure, and harder still to repay. My balance sheet in this project resembles that of most of today’s Western governments : what I owe to my creditors far outstrips the value of my own output. For discussions of Beckett, I am immensely grateful to Stanley Cavell, Marjorie Perloff,JamesConant,PaolaMarrati,JamesNoggle,AnselmHaverkamp,Christoph Menke, Katrin Trüstedt, Hent de Vries, and Christopher Johnson. For the chapter on Wordsworth, I am similarly indebted to Richard Eldridge, Kim Evans ,AsjaSzafraniec,JamesLoxley,andAndrewTaylor.ThankstoJamiBartlett and her colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, for inviting me to talk about tragedy, and to Jan Balakian and Joshua Polster for the opportunity to air my views on Miller—both were immensely rewarding experiences. Ralph Berry, Garry Hagberg, and Lawrence Rhu formed a phenomenal triumvirate of brains to pick. My colleague Merrick Burrow made some helpful suggestions aboutfindingapublisherforthisproject,andmyfriendTimShawhashelpedme develop some fun ways of teaching the ideas herein. The oldest of these debts, however,istoJoshCohen,whoabouttenyearsagohandedmeasyllabustoteach that steered me away from my fixation on Wittgenstein and Beckett and toward Thoreau’s Walden and Poe’s “The Imp of the Perverse,” thereby—unbeknownst tousboth—sketchingouttheperimeterofthisprojectforme. Acknowledgments x ac k n o w l e d g m e n t s An earlier version of chapter 3 appeared as “From the Sublime to the Ordinary : Stanley Cavell’s Beckett” in Textual Practice 23, no. 4 (August 2009): 543–58, and chapter 5 was published in an earlier form as “What Did Cavell Want of Poe?” in Angelaki 10, no. 3 (December 2005): 91–99. Both are used here by permission of the publisher, Routledge (Taylor & Francis Ltd., http://www .tandf.co.uk/journals). An earlier version of chapter 4 appeared, under the same title, as chapter 11 in Stanley Cavell: Philosophy, Literature, and Criticism, edited by Andrew Taylor and James Loxley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), pp. 166–80. I am grateful to Manchester University Press for permission to use this material here. In the final analysis, I am most heavily indebted to Alice, to my sister Julia, and to my parents, Malcolm and Helga. They helped me see the funny side of debating the politics of marriage whilst my own was in free fall. Writing about the link between the idea of America and a tragic father-son relationship was not easy at a time when, tragically, my own son was being taken from me to live there. So it is finally to him that I dedicate this volume. Cedric, I only wish I could have spent the time it took to write this book with you instead. ...