World Viewed

Stanley Cavell (1926–2018) was Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, Emeritus, at Harvard University. His numerous books include The Claim of Reason, Cities of Words, and Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow.

Perhaps more than in any other country, film studies in the United States have been hampered by a tradition of casual reporting and a smuggish academic refusal to allow a mass entertainment art any serious intellectual status. Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed is an important a valuable counter to this tradition and its journalistic judgments… As a philosopher of art, Cavell is clearly not only a rigorous thinker but an imaginative one who can convincingly integrate phenomenological concepts into film studies or translate figures from Baudelaire’s Painter of Modern Life into illuminating categories of film analysis.

• Foreword to the Enlarged Edition Preface 1. An Autobiography of Companions 2. Sights and Sounds 3. Photograph and Screen 4. Audience, Actor, and Star 5. Types; Cycles as Genres 6. Ideas of Origin 7. Baudelaire and the Myths of Film 8. The Military Man and the Woman 9. The Dandy 10. End of the Myths 11. The Medium and Media of Film 12. The World as Mortal: Absolute Age and Youth 13. The World as a Whole: Color 14. Automatism 15. Excursus: Some Modernist Painting 16. Exhibition and Self-Reference 17. The Camera's Implication 18. Assertions in Techniques 19. The Acknowledgment of Silence More of The World Viewed Notes Index