Secular Mysteries: Stanley Cavell and English Romanticism

Product Description

Stanley Cavell and English Romanticism serves as both introduction to Cavell for Romanticists, and to the larger question of what philosophy means for the reading of literature, as well as to the importance and relevance of Romantic literature to Cavell's thought.

Illustrated through close readings of Wordsworth and Shelley, and extended discussions of Emerson and Thoreau as well as Cavell, Duffy proposes a Romanticism of persisting cultural relevance and truly trans-Atlantic scope. The turn to romanticism of America's most distinguished "ordinary-language" philosopher is shown to be tied to the neo-Romantic claim that far from being merely an illustrator of the truths discovered by philosophy, poetry is its equal partner in the instituting of knowledge. This book will be vital reading for anyone interested in Romanticism, Stanley Cavell and the ever-deepening connections between literature and philosophy.

Review

By reading some central texts of Wordsworth and Shelley, along with those of Cavell, as efforts at the reconstruction or resettlement of the everyday, Edward Duffy recalls to us powerfully why both English Romantic poetry and Cavellian philosophy matter for us as at once 'records of losses' and 'texts of recovery.' Duffy's care, subtlety, power, and insight in this recalling will be of enormous help to anyone trying to make sense of the strange powers of these variously wonderful works that show the philosophical and the literary in engagement with each other.

Duffy's understanding of Cavell is clearly profound, and he has an impressively detailed and broad knowledge of a swathe of Romantic poetry.
The Year's Work in English Studies

Edward Duffy's approaches to Cavell's work significantly extend and consolidate Cavell's forays into Romanticism. Just as significant are his companion efforts to understand Cavell's enterprises as in themselves Romantic projects. For Cavell, in Duffy's reading, the skeptic seeks to confront and isolate the ground of knowledge in each individual knower. But skepticism yields a sense of the isolation in human knowledge that is self-imposed and inauthentic. Duffy demonstrates that the skeptic avoids the knowledge that 'we knowers' exist at a point 'where all stand single.' For Cavell's Romanticism, our separateness is not the consequence of a failure of our knowledge but a condition of being an individual. The redemption of solitude from the corrosiveness of a skeptical self-consciousness makes possible an openness to companionship. Through this book's painstaking attention to the details of a poem, we learn of the specific possibilities of poetry as embodying and acknowledging the human voice. Through his careful attention to the steps of Cavell's reflections, Duffy brings us to the territory where philosophy and poetry meet. The effect is stunning.

About the Author

Edward T. Duffy is Associate Professor of English (Emeritus) at Marquette University, USA. He is the author of Rousseau in England: The Context for Shelley's Critique of the Enlightenment (University of California Press) and The Constitution of Shelley's Poetry (Anthem Press).