Joan Richardson

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  interviews April 01, 2011

  Bookforum talks with Stanley Cavell

  Stanley Cavell's eighteen books range from treatments of individual writers (Wittgenstein, Emerson, Shakespeare) to studies in aesthetics, film, and religion. His influence, extending beyond philosophy into literature, film, and music criticism, has transformed the way we understand culture.

  Stanley Cavell grew up in Atlanta and Sacramento, California. He was a student in music at UC Berkeley and Juilliard before studying philosophy at UCLA and completing a Ph.D. at Harvard University. His eighteen books range from treatments of individual writers (Wittgenstein, Emerson, Shakespeare) to studies in aesthetics, film, and religion. Through his writing and almost half century of teaching—six years at Berkeley, thirty-five at Harvard—Cavell has become "one of the great philosophers," as Jay Parini wrote in the Hudson Review in 1988. Cavell served for many years as president of the

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  culture Apr/May 2010

  The Transcendentalist Strain

  Stanley Cavell grew up in Atlanta and Sacramento, California. He was a student in music at UC Berkeley and Juilliard before studying philosophy at UCLA and completing a Ph.D. at Harvard University. His eighteen books range from treatments of individual writers (Wittgenstein, Emerson, Shakespeare) to studies in aesthetics, film, and religion. Through his writing and almost half century of teaching—six years at Berkeley, thirty-five at Harvard—Cavell has become “one of the great philosophers,” as Jay Parini wrote in the Hudson Review in 1988. Cavell served for many years as president of the

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  print Sept/Oct/Nov 2009

  Crash Course

  Morris Dickstein’s Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression is a sweeping, stirring, disturbing, and more than occasionally thrilling account of a period unsettlingly like our own. Citing Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s second inaugural address, in 1937, when the nation had come to understand “the need to find through government the instrument of our united purpose to solve for the individual the ever-rising problems of a complex civilization,” Dickstein observes: “This was the New Deal message that was rediscovered during the financial meltdown of 2008, after decades of

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  culture Sept/Oct/Nov 2007

  MOTION RESEARCH

  When was the last time you couldn’t put down a book of literary criticism or didn’t want it to end? Ever? In Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare, Angus Fletcher, a magically gifted teacher in whose presence we hear what thinking feels like, has given us not only a brilliant study of the early modern period but a handbook for our time as well, a meditation on the extended moment when the “mind . . . discovers the psyche to be an integral part of the world out there.” While Fletcher’s frame is the 110 years between the births of Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Galileo in 1564