Stanley Cavell's American Dream
Shakespeare, Philosophy, and Hollywood Movies
A generous invitation for readers to profit from Cavell's Emersonian ways of combining Shakespeare's evergreen worlds with those of Holly wood's Golden Age.
Stanley Cavell's American Dream moves from discussions of Cavell's philosophy to readings of Walker Percy, Harold Bloom, Shakespeare, Emerson, and contemporary novelist Jane Smiley, traversing institutional divides with a grace and lucidity which recalls the best writing of such stylistically-gifted critics as Hugh Kenner and Alfred Kazin. Rewarding
and pleasurable to read.
"Lawrence Rhu's wonderful volume on Stanley Cavell teaches us how to enjoy all Cavell's eloquent, casual, ceremonious, solemn, and high comic ways.
Rhu's stated aim is to read Cavell's studies of Shakespeare and Hollywood and transcendentalism together, rather than separating them into disciplinary distinctness, as has been the standard. . . Recommended.---—Choice
This book brightly illuminates the work of Shakespeare, Emerson and Hollywood melodrama and re-marriage comedy as well as the work of the thinker who has given us such extraordinary pathways into them.
Stanley Cavell's American Dream is an insightful, original contribution to Shakespeare criticism, film criticism, and to our theoretical understanding of the relationship between the two great arts.
A work for every Shakespearean—experts and amateurs, teachers and their students, whom this book will delight and instruct. Its eloquence and accessiblity make it ideal for graduate and undergraduate classes.
Rhu shows how Cavell's philosophy is inseparable from his interest in Shakespeare and Hollywood and so, indirectly, how the interests of an important philosopher are just like anyone else's, and how philosophy for Cavell represents one of the few remaining possibilities of expressing one's simultaneous affection for both Hamlet and North by Northwest.