Cavell Bibliography (Secondary Works)

Intended to be a resource for scholars who work on Stanley Cavell, here is a hyperlinked bibliography of commentaries on Cavell’s writings and ideas. In a separate post, we have made available a similarly hyperlinked bibliography of primary works written by Cavell himself. We welcome your suggestions for additions and corrections: you are invited to contact us by email.

Monographs and edited collections that are focused on Cavell (ordered chronologically):

Smith, Joseph and William Kerrigan, eds. Images in Our Souls: Cavell, Psychoanalysis, and Cinema (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987)

Fischer, Michael. Stanley Cavell and Literary Skepticism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989)

Fleming, Richard and Michael Payne, eds. The Senses of Stanley Cavell (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1989)

Cohen, Ted, Paul Guyer, and Hilary Putnam, eds., Pursuits of Reason: Essays in Honor of Stanley Cavell (Lubbock: Texas Tech Univ. Press, 1993)

Fleming, Richard. The State of Philosophy: An Invitation to a Reading in Three Parts of Stanley Cavell’s “The Claim of Reason” (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1993)

Mulhall, Stephen. Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994)

Gould, Timothy. Hearing Things: Voice and Method in the Writing of Stanley Cavell (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1998)

Rothman, William, Marian Keane, and Stanley Cavell. Reading Cavell’s The World Viewed: a Philosophical Perspective on Film (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 2000)

Hammer, Espen. Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity, and the Ordinary (Cambridge: Polity, 2002)

Eldridge, Richard, ed. Stanley Cavell (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003)

Jost, Walter and Kenneth Dauber. Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking After Cavell After Wittgenstein (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 2003)

Goodman, Russell, ed. Contending with Stanley Cavell (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005)

Crary, Alice and Sanford Shieh, eds. Reading Cavell (London: Routledge, 2006)

Norris, Andrew, ed. The Claim to Community: Essays on Stanley Cavell and Political Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2006)

Rhu, Lawrence. Stanley Cavell’s American Dream: Shakespeare, Philosophy, and Hollywood Movies (New York: Fordham, 2006)

Dula, Peter. Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010)

Eldridge, Richard and Bernard Rhie, eds. Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies: Consequences of Skepticism (New York: Continuum, 2011)

Saito, Naoko and Paul Standish, eds. Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2011)

Loxley, James and Andrew Taylor, eds. Stanley Cavell: Philosophy, Literature and Criticism (Manchester, UK: Manchester Univ. Press, 2011)

Dahl, Espen. Stanley Cavell, Religion, and Continental Philosophy (Indiana Univ. Press, 2014)

Other secondary works (ordered alphabetically by last name):

Affeldt, Steven. “The Ground of Mutuality: Criteria, Judgment, and Intelligibility in Stephen Mulhall and Stanley Cavell,” European Journal of Philosophy 6 (1998): 1-31.

Alweiss, Lilian. “Against Cartesian Mistrust: Cavell, Husserl, and the Other Mind Sceptic,” Ratio 23.3 (July 2010): 241-259.

Altieri, Charles. “Wonder in The Winter’s Tale: A Cautionary Account of Epistemic Criticism,” in John Gibson, Wolfang Huemer, Luca Pocci, eds., A Sense of the World: Essays on Fiction, Narraative, and Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2005): 266-86. Essay title is linked to a PDF of a manuscript version located on Prof. Altieri’s personal website.

Bates, Stanley and Ted Cohen. “More on What We Say,” Metaphilosophy 3.1 (1972): 1-24.

Baz, Avner. “On when words are called for: Cavell, McDowell, and the wording of the world,” Inquiry 46.4 (Dec. 2003): 473-500.

Bearn, Gordon. “Sounding Serious: Cavell and Derrida,” Representations 64 (Summer 1998): 65-92.

Bearn, Gordon. “Staging Authenticity: A Critique of Cavell’s Modernism,” Philosophy and Literature 24.2 (October 2000): 294-311.

Beckwith, Sarah. Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness, (Cornell University Press, 2012)

Bernstein, Charles. “Reading Cavell Reading Wittgenstein,” Boundary 2, 9.2 (winter 1981)

Bernstein, J.M. Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2006). Includes a chapter on Cavell.

Berry, R.M. “What is a Narrative Convention? (Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell and Literary Criticism),” Narrative 3.1 (Jan 1995): 18-32.

Berry, R.M. “Cavell’s Meaning 1968,” Symploke 11.1-2 (2003): 237-41.

Bruns, Gerald, “The Last Romantic: Stanley Cavell and the Writing of Philosophy” in Brun’s Tragic Thoguhts at the End of Philosophy: Lanugage, Literature, and Ethical Theory (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1999): 199-218.

Bruns, Gerald, “Stanley Cavell’s Shakespeare,” Critical Inquiry 16.3 (spring 1990): 612-32.

Bruns, Gerald. “Reply to Crewe and Conant,” Critical Inquiry 17.3 (Spring 1991): 635-638.

Budick, Emily Miller. “Sacvan Bercovitch, Stanley Cavell, and the Romance Theory of American Fiction,” in PMLA 107.1 (Jan 1992): 78-91; reprinted in Carol Colatrella and Joseph Alkan, eds., Cohesion and Dissent in America (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994): 48-73.

Conant, James. “On Bruns, on Cavell,” Critical Inquiry 17.3 (Spring 1991): 616-634.

Costello, Diarmuid. “On the Very Idea of a ‘Specific’ Medium: Michael Fried and Stanley Cavell on Painting and Photography as Arts,” Critical Inquiry 34.2 (Jan 2008): 274-312.

Culler, Jonathan. “Bad Writing and Good Philosophy,” The Literary in Theory: Cultural Memory in the Present, (Stanford UP, 2006): 205-221.

Danto, Arthur. “Review: Philosophy and/as Film and/as If Philosophy,” October 23 (Winter 1982): 4-14.

Davis, Colin. Critical Excess: Overreading in Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, Zizek, and Cavell (Stanford Univ. Press, 2010). Includes a chapter on Cavell.

Diamond, Cora. “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” in Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 1.2 (June 2003): 1-26; reprinted in Cary Wolfe, ed., Philosophy and Animal Life (New York: Columbia Univ. Press).

de Vries, Hent. “From ‘Ghost in the Machine’ to ‘Spiritual Automaton’: Philosophical Meditation in Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Levinas,” Self and Other: Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion (Springer 2007): 77-97.

Eldridge, Richard. “Romantic Rebirth in a Secular Age: Cavell’s Aversive Exertions,” The Journal of Religion 71.3 (July 1991): 410-418. A review of In Quest of the Ordinary.

Eldridge, Richard. The Persistence of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001). Final chapter is on Cavell and Holderlin.

Eldridge, Richard. “The Normal and the Normative: Wittgenstein’s Legacy, Kripke, and Cavell,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 36.4 (1986): 555-75.

Fischer, Michael. “Stanley Cavell’s Wittgenstein,” in Reed Way Dasenbrock, ed., Redrawing the Lines: Analytic Philosophy, Deconstruction, and Literary Theory (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1989): 49-60.

Fischer, Michael. “Stanley Cavell and Criticizing the University from Within,” Philosophy and Literature 30.2 (2006): 471-483.

Fleming, Richard. First Word Philosophy: Wittgenstein-Austin-Cavell, Writings on Ordinary Language Philosophy (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2004).

Fodor, Jerry and Jerrold Katz. “The Availability of What We Say,” The Philosophical Review 72.1 (1963): 57-71.

Furtak, Rick Anthony. “Skepticism and Perceptual Faith: Henry David Thoreau and Stanley Cavell on Seeing and Believing,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy 43.3 (Summer 2007): 542-561.

Goldblatt, David. “Cavellian Conversation and the Life of Art,” Philosophy and Literature 29.2 (October 2005): 460-476.

Gonya, Adam. “Stanley Cavell and Two Pictures of the Voice,” The European Legacy 14.5 (August 2009): 587-598.

Gustafsson, Martin. “Perfect Pitch and Austinian Examples: Cavell, McDowell, Wittgenstein, and the Philosophical Significance of Ordinary Language,” Inquiry 48.5 (August 2005): 356-389.

Greenham, David. “The Skeptical Deduction: Reading Kant and Cavell in Emerson’s ‘Self-Reliance,’” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 53.3 (2007): 253-281.

Haase, Mathias. “Drei Formen der Ersten Person Plural,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 55.2 (2007): 225-43.

Hagberg, Garry. “On Philosophy as Therapy: Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Autobiographical Writing” in Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (April 2003): 196-210; reprinted in Hagberg’s Describing Ourselves: Wittgentein and Autobiographical Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008): 240-58.

Hillman, David. “The Worst Case of Knowing the Other? Stanley Cavell and Troilus and Cressida,” Philosophy and Literature 32.1 (April 2008): 74-86.

Hollander, John. “Stanley Cavell and ‘The Claim of Reason,'” Critical Inquiry 6.4 (Summer 1980): 575-588.

Kerr, Fergus. Immortal Longings: Versions of Transcending Humanity (London: SPCK, 1997). Includes a chapter on Cavell.

Kronick, Joseph. “Telling the Difference: Stanley Cavell’s Resistance to Theory,” American Literary History 5.1 (Spring 1993): 193-200.

Lackey, Douglas. “Reflections on Cavell’s Ontology of Film,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 32 (1973): 271-3.

Lemm, Vanessa. “Is Nietzsche a Perfectionist? Rawls, Cavell, and the Politics of Culture in Nietzsche’s ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’,” The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 34 (Autumn 2007): 5-27.

McGinn, Marie. “The Real Problem of Others: Cavell, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein on Scepticism about Other Minds,” The European Journal of Philosophy 6 (1998): 45-58.

McDowell, John. “Comment on Stanley Cavell’s ‘Companionable Thinking‘” in Alice Crary, ed., Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007) and Cary Wolfe, ed., Philosophy and Animal Life (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2008).

Melville, Stephen. “Oblique and Ordinary: Stanley Cavell’s Engagements of Emerson,” American Literary History 5.1 (Spring 1993).

Modleski, Tania. “Editorial Notes,” Critical Inquiry 17.1 (Autumn 1990): 237-244. Response to two essays by Cavell: “Postscript (1989): To Whom It May Concern,” and “Ugly Duckling, Funny Butterfly: Bette Davis and Now, Voyager.” Includes a response by Cavell.

Moi, Toril. “‘It Was as If He Meant Something Different from What He Said: All the Time’: Language, Metaphysics, and the Everyday in ‘The Wild Duck’,” New Literary History 33.4 (Autumn 2002): 655-686.

Moi, Toril. “Becoming Modern: Modernity and Theater in Emperor and Galilean,” in Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006): 188-222.

Moi, Toril. “‘I Am a Woman’: The Personal and the Philosophical” (esp. pp. 207-250) in What Is A Woman? And Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999): 121-250.

Mooney, Edward. Lost Intimacy in American Thought: Recovering Personal Philosophy from Thoreau to Cavell (New York: Continuum 2009), esp. chapter 6 and 7.

Mooney, Edward. “Two Testimonies in American Philosophy: Stanley Cavell, Henry Bugbee,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 17.2 (2003): 108-121.

Mulhall, Stephen. “Promising, Consent, and Citizenship: Rawls and Cavell on Morality and Politics,” Political Theory 25.2 (April 1997): 171-192.

Mulhall, Stephen. “The Givenness of Grammar: A Reply to Steven Affeldt,” The European Journal of Philosophy 6 (1998): 32-44.

Mulhall, Stephen. The Wounded Animal: J.M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2009). Chapter 5 considers Cavell’s response (published as “Companionable Thinking”) to Cora Diamond’s essay, “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy”

Norris, Andrew. “Political Revisions: Stanley Cavell and Political Philosophy,” Political Theory 30.6 (Dec. 2002): 828-51.

Norris, Andrew. “Stanley Cavell and the Claim to Community,” Theory & Event 12.1 (2005).

Norris, Andrew. “Thoreau, Cavell, and the Foundations of True Political Expression,” in ed. Jack Turner, A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau (University Press of Kentucky, 2009), pp. 423-446.

Ogden, Benjamin. “What Philosophy Can’t Say About Literature: Stanley Cavell and Endgame,” Philosophy and Literature 33.1 (April 2009): 126-138.

Owen, David. “Cultural Diversity and the Conversation of Justice: Reading Cavell on Political Voice and the Expression of Consent,” Political Theory 27.5 (Oct. 1999): 579-596.

Parini, Jay. “The Importance of Stanley Cavell,” The Hudson Review 38.1 (Spring 1985): 115-119.

Perl, Jeffrey, ed., “A Taste for Complexity: Ten Nondisciples of Stanley Cavell,” Common Knowledge 5.2 (fall 1996): 21-78.

Putnam, Hilary. “Rules, Attunements, and ‘Applying Words to the World,'” in The Legacy of Wittgenstein: Pragmatism or Deconstruction, eds. Ludwig Nagl and Chantal Mouffe (Peter Lang, 2001). An essay considering the 1998 debate between Affeldt and Mulhall in the pages of The European Journal of Philosophy.

Rhu, Lawrence. “King Lear in Their Time: On Bloom and Cavell on Shakespare,” in Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare, eds. Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer (Palgrave Macmillan: 2002): 227-246.

Rodowick, D.N. “An Elegy for Theory,” October 122 (Fall 2007): 91-109.

Rorty, Richard. “From Epistemology to Romance: Cavell on Skepticism,” Review of Metaphysics 34 (1981): 759-74.

Rudrum, David. “From the Sublime to the Ordinary: Stanley Cavell’s Beckett,” Textual Practice (August 2009): 543-558.

Saito, Naoko. “Truth is Translated: Cavell’s Thoreau and the Transcendence of America,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 21.2 (2007): 124-32.

Scheman, Naomi. “Missing Mothers / Desiring Daughters: Framing the Sight of Women,” Critical Inquiry 15.1 (Autumn 1998): 62-89.

Standish, Paul. “Education for grown-ups, a religion for adults: scepticism and alterity in Cavell and Levinas,” Ethics and Education 2.1 (March 2007): 73-91.

Stewart, Garrett. Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2007). Appendix includes a discussion of Cavell.

Stone, Abraham. “Specific and Generic Objects in Cavell and Thomas Aquinas,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67.1 (Jul 2003): 48-74.

Stroud, Barry. “Reasonable Claims: Cavell and the Tradition,” The Journal of Philosophy 77 (1980): 731-44.

Turvey, Malcolm. “Is scepticism a ‘natural possibility’ of language? Reasons to be sceptical of Cavell’s Wittgenstein,” in Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey, eds., Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts (London: Routledge, 2001): 117-136.

Viefhues-Bailey, Ludger. Beyond the Philosopher’s Fear: A Cavellian Reading of Gender, Origin and Religion in Modern Skepticism (Ashgate Publishing, 2007).

von Rautenfeld, Hans. “Charitable Interpretations: Emerson, Rawls, and Cavell on the Use of Public Reason,” Political Theory 32.1 (Feb 2004): 61-84.

Wolfe, Cary. “Alone with America: Cavell, Emerson, and the Politics of Individualism,” New Literary History 25.1 (Winter 1994): 135-57.

Ziarek, Ewa. The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996); includes a chapter on Cavell.