The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Enlarged Edition [Paperback]

Stanley Cavell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1979

Hear Lawrence Buell, Michael Sandel, Stanley Cavell, and Wai Chee Dimock speak at the Bicentennial Emerson Forum to be held April 3, 2003 at Harvard University. Read more...

Editorial Reviews

Review

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to think of Stanley Cavell's The World Viewed as simply a film book...Cavell's book is about films...at a thoroughly engaged level of reflection...It does not move one to rush to the nearest movie theater for a new immersion in films; rather, it prompts one to reexamine one's own past experiences of films...With Cavell the sense of the claims which movies make upon us is intense. He does not linger over any particular one, in a spirit of impatience roughly analogous to the one which prompted T. S. Eliot to say the `The poetry does not matter.' The poetry does not matter, poetry matters. The film does not matter, film matters. (College English )

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.
--Timothy Corrigan (Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism )

About the Author

Stanley Cavell is Walter M. Cabot Professor, Emeritus, of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, Harvard University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press; Enlarged edition (January 1, 1979)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067496196X
• ISBN-13: 978-0674961968
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #120,027 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The bias of prejudice, July 16, 2006

By 

anonymous (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Enlarged Edition (Paperback)

Cavell relies on his own experience of cinema in such a way that the reader is invited to try to find himself with respect to his claims. There may or may not be a meeting of the minds. But this doesn't mean Cavell is biased. He's simply calling it as he sees it. He asks nothing more and nothing less of us. I don't see that a personal judgment might not be objective. And if it is very difficult to experience what Cavell is gesturing towards, that seems like all the more reason for being cautious when referring to what you might wrongly be calling "subjective prejudices." This book is worth the hard work.

14 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Creative but Prejudiced, May 7, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Enlarged Edition (Paperback)

Since Stanley Cavell was an esteemed philosophy professor at Harvard University, when he wrote this book, it was a boon for film theorists everywhere; the academic elite were finally taking film theory seriously. However, even though in the book there are great moments of insight into the spectatorship of films, Cavell is very biased towards his own cinematic experience and will often make broad claims to the superiority of the classic films with which he grew up over any recent film. His predilections are often purely personal and do not involve an objective understanding of the films. The book contains many wonderful moments that stem from a thought-provoking philosopher yet it is very difficult to experience them through the author's subjective prejudices.