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Title: Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman by Stanley Cavell ISBN: 0-226-09816-8 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: January, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3 (3 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Cavell's WORST book
Comment: No, I haven't read them all, but this is a severely disappointing follow-up to Cavell's near-perfect previous volume on Hollywood film, "Pursuits of Happiness" (a collection of essays on, mostly, screwball comedies). Especially given that the idea for the volume is such a great one, foreshadowed in an earlier essay (included here, on "Letter from an Unknown Woman") in which Cavell suggestively drew a connection between Hollywood melodrama and Freud's early work on hysteria as a new way of getting at our author's trademark obsession, epistemological problems as human problems. But what made "Pursuits of Happiness" such a tremendous work of film criticism is that whatever Cavell's pretensions, one always believed that he loved the movies he was writing about. Here that feeling is missing; instead you get the feeling he doesn't understand the point of most of these movies at all, and even (shudder!) that his attitude to the genre is condescending. Well, no critic or philosopher can do everything. A sorry introduction to either Cavell or the great Hollywood genre of the women's picture, which still awaits the kind of exposition that Cavell could have given it, at his best. The two stars are for the excellent essay on "Now, Voyager"; the essay on "Gaslight" is an interesting philosophical read, with very little to do with the film; the essay on "Stella Dallas" should be avoided like the plague.
Rating: 2
Summary: Not bad, certainly, but not the best.
Comment: To say that Cavell's prose is challenging is charitable, at best. True, his ideas are solid and any good, insightful work requires effort to understand, but Cavell seems to circle around himself in a rhetorical spiral of namedropping and navel-gazing with an irksome regularity. He frequently explores ill-transitioned tangets with no warning or reason apprent, and the overall read becomes fractured and one is left wondering why. This said, when one can extract the ore of Cavell's reason, it is pure gold. Truly, a mixed bag.
Rating: 5
Summary: CAVELL'S BEST BOOK
Comment: THE BOOK IS THE CUMULATIVE RESULT OF CAVELL'S REMARKABLE QUEST TO BRING PHILOSOPHY BACK TO THE HUMANITIES.
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Title: Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage by Stanley Cavell ISBN: 067473906X Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: March, 1984 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film by Stanley Cavell ISBN: 067496196X Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: February, 1980 List Price(USD): $21.50 |
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Title: A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Jerusalem-Harvard Lectures) by Stanley Cavell ISBN: 0674669819 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: April, 1996 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (The Carus Lectures, 19th Ser. 1988) by Stanley Cavell ISBN: 0226098214 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: February, 1991 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Disowning Knowledge : In Seven Plays of Shakespeare by Stanley Cavell ISBN: 0521529204 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 31 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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