The Holiday in His Eye

Presents an original, insightful, and compelling vision of the trajectory of Cavell’s oeuvre, one that takes his kinship with Emerson as inextricably bound up with his ever-deepening thinking about movies. From The World Viewed to Cities of Words, writing about movies was strand over strand with Stanley Cavell's philosophical work. Cavell was one of the first philosopher in the United States to make film a significant focus of his thought, and William Rothman has long been one of his most astute readers. The Holiday in His Eye collects Rothman's writings about Cavell—many of them previously unpublished—to offer a lucid, serious introduction to and overview of Cavell's work, the influence of which has been somewhat limited by both the intrinsic difficulty of his ideas and his challenging prose style. In these engaging and accessible yet philosophically serious and rigorously argued essays, Rothman presents an original, insightful, and compelling vision of the trajectory of Cavell's oeuvre, one that takes Cavell's kinship with Emerson as inextricably bound up with his ever-deepening thinking about movies. William Rothman is Professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Miami. His many books include Tuitions and Intuitions: Essays at the Intersection of Film Criticism and Philosophy and Hitchcock, Second Edition: The Murderous Gaze, both also published by SUNY Press.