Cavell Bibliography (Primary Works)

Intended to be a resource for scholars who work on Stanley Cavell, here is a hyperlinked bibliography of texts written by Cavell himself. In a separate post, we’ve also begun to assemble a similarly hyperlinked bibliography of secondary works on Cavell. Whenever possible, we’ve added links to each entry in this bibliography that will take you to online versions of the texts themselves (whether stored digitally on JSTOR, Project Muse, [in excerpted form on] Google Books, or elsewhere). In those cases where a particular text is not available for reading online, we’ve either added a link to the book’s Amazon sales page, or, in those cases where the text is an article published in an issue of a journal that is not available on the web, we’ve left the bibliographic entry unlinked. If you notice a text that is missing, or an entry that needs correction, please let us know by emailing us.

Cavell Bibliography: Primary Works

Books

The Claim to Rationality: Knowledge and the Basis of Morality (Ph.D. Dissertation, 1961)

Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1969; Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977; updated version, 2002)

The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (New York: The Viking Press, 1971; New York: Penguin, 1977)

The Senses of Walden (New York: The Viking Press, 1972) 

The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979; Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982)

The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (enlarged edition), including new: “Foreword to the Enlarged Edition” and “More of The World Viewed” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979)

The Senses of Walden: An Expanded Edition, including new: “Thinking of Emerson” and “An Emerson Mood” (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981; Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992)

Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981)

Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984; Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988)

Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987; updated 2003 to Disowning Knowledge: In Seven Plays of Shakespeare)

In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1988)

This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989)

Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990)

A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1994)

Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995)

Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996)

The Cavell Reader, ed. Stephen Mulhall (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996)

Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2003)

Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2005)

Cavell on Film, William Rothman, ed. (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005)

Philosophy The Day After Tomorrow (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2006)

Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory (Palo Alto: Stanford Univ. Press, forthcoming August 2010)

Essays

(Note: for now, we’ve chosen not to list some of the many originally stand-alone essays that Cavell has since reprinted in one of the books listed above; they will be added to this list in the future)

With Alexander Sesonske, “Logical Empiricism and Pragmatism in Ethics,” The Journal of Philosophy 48 (4 January 1951): 5-17.

With Alexander Sesonske, “Moral Theory, Ethical Judgments and Empricism,” Mind 61.244 (October 1952): 543-63.

“Some Reflections on the Ontology of Film,” New American Review 12 (1971): 140-59.

“On Makavejev on Bergman,” Critical Inquiry Vol. 6, No. 2 (Winter 1979): 305-30.

“Pursuits of Happiness: A Reading of The Lady Eve,” New Literary History 10.3 (Spring 1979): 581-601.

“Thinking of Emerson,” New Literary History 11.1 (Autumn 1079): 167-76.

“Epistemology and Tragedy: A Reading of Othello,” Daedalus 108.3 (Summer 1979): 27-43.

“Knowledge as Transgression: Mostly a Reading of It Happened One Night,” Daedalus 109.2 (Spring 1980): 147-75.

“A Reply to John Hollander,” Critical Inquiry 6.4 (Summer 1980): 589-91.

“North by Northwest,” Critical Inquiry 7.4 (Summer 1981): 152-73.

“Politics as Opposed to What?” Critical Inquiry 9.1 (September 1982): 157-78.

“The Fact of Television,” Daedalus 111.4 (Fall 1982): 75-96.

“The Thought of Movies,” The Yale Review 72.2 (Winter 1983): 181-200.

“‘Who does the wolf love?’ Reading Coriolanus,” Representations no. 3 (Summer 1983): 1-20.

“What Photography Calls Thinking,” Raritan 4.4 (Spring 1985): 1-21. Reprinted in Raritan Reading, ed. Richard Poirier, pp. 47-65 (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1990)

“The Division of Talent,” Critical Inquiry 11.4 (June 1985): 519-38.

“A Reply to Robert Mankin on The Claim of Reason,” Salmagundi 67 (Summer 1985): 90-6.

“Being Odd, Getting Even: Threats to Individuality,” Salmagundi 67 (Summer 1985): 97-128.

“A Capra Moment,” Humanities 6.4 (August 1985): 3-7.

“Hope Against Hope,” The American Poetry Review 15.1 (January-February 1986): 9-13.

“Observations on Art and Science,” Daedalus 115.3 (Summer 1986): 171-89.

“The Fantastic of Philosophy,” The American Poetry Review 15.3 (May-June 1986): 45-7.

“Freud and Philosophy: A Fragment,” Critical Inquiry 13.2 (Winter 1987): 386-93.

“Notes after Austin,” The Yale Review 76.3 (Spring 1987): 313-22.

“Declining Decline: Wittgenstein as a Philosopher of Culture,” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy and the Social Sciences 31.3 (Spring 1988): 253-64.

“Two Cheers for Romance,” in Passionate Attachments: Thinking about Love, eds. Willard Gaylin and Ethel Persons, pp. 85-100 (New York: The Free Press, 1988)

“Naughty Orators: Negation of Voice in Gaslight,” in Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, eds. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, pp. 340-77 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1989).

“Who Disappoints Whom?” Critical Inquiry 15.3 (Spring 1989): 606-10.

“Postscript (1989): To Whom It May Concern,” Critical Inquiry 16.2 (Winter 1990): 248-89.

“Ugly Duckling, Funny Butterfly: Bette Davis and Now, Voyager,” Critical Inquiry 16.2 (Winter 1990): 248-89.

In “Editorial Notes,” Critical Inquiry 17.1 (Fall 1990): 238-44. A response to Tania Modleski.

“Aversive Thinking: Emersonian Representations in Heidegger and Nietzsche,” New Literary History 22.1 (1991): 129-60.

“The Idea of Home,” Social Research 58.1 (Spring 1991): 9-10.

“In the Meantime: Authority, Tradition, and the Future of the Discipines,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 5.2 (Spring 1992): 229-37.

“Macbeth Apalled (I),” Raritan 12.2 (Fall 1992): 1-15.

“Macbeth Appalled (II),” Raritan, 12.3 (Winter 1993): 1-15.

“Nothing Goes Without Saying: Stanley Cavell Reads the Marx Brothers,” London Review of Books 16.1 (January 6, 1994).

“What is the Emersonian Event? A Comment on Kateb’s Emerson,” New Literary History 25.4 (Autumn 1994): 951-8.

“Comments on Veena Das’s Essay ‘Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain’,” Daedalus 125.1 (1996): 93-8.

“Something Out of the Ordinary,” The Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association (1997), pp. 23-37.

“Benjamin and Wittgenstein: Signals and Affinities,” Critical Inquiry 25.3 (Winter 1999): 235-46.

“Night and Day: Heidegger and Thoreau,” in Appropriating Heidegger, eds. James E Faulconer and Mark A. Wrathall (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000).

“Beginning to Read Barbara Cassin,” Hypatia 15.4 (2000): 99-101.

“Preface,” Robert Warshow’s The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 2002).

“Foreword,” for Shoshana Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J.L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002). Reprinted in The Claims of Literature: A Shoshana Felman Reader, ed. by Emily Sun, Eyal Peretz, and Ulrich Baer (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).

“The World as Things: Collecting Thoughts on Collecting,” in Yves-Alain Bois and Bernard Blistene, eds., Rendezvous (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2003).

“Departures,” in Frederic Brenner, Diaspora: Homelands in Exile, 2 Vols. (New York: Harper Collins, 2003).

“Excerpts from Memory,” Critical Inquiry 32.4 (Summer 2006): 767-811.

“Foreword,” to Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

“Companionable Thinking,” in Alice Crary, ed., Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); reprinted in Philosophy and Animal Life, ed. Cary Wolfe (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2008).

“Pourquoi les films comptent-ils? Discussion entre Stanley Cavell et Arnaud Desplechin,” Esprit, August-September 2008, pp. 208-219. (in French)

“The Touch of Words,” in William Day and Victor Krebs, eds., Seeing Wittgenstein Anew (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), pp. 81-98.