Stanley Cavell on Aesthetic Understanding

Abstract A paucity of research has been conducted with learners in elementary classrooms on both the use of and the student creation of science comics. During the classroom-based research featured in this article, Grade 4 students designed ocean threat comics for the culminating activity of an interdisciplinary Ocean Literacy unit, one component of a larger study. Throughout the research, the students were afforded with opportunities to develop their visual meaning-making skills and competences, as well as their aesthetic understanding of and critical thinking about multimodal ensembles through participation in activities that focused on various elements of visual art and design, and conventions of the medium of comics. The visual and descriptive analysis of one student’s ocean threat comics, which includes excerpts from the interview about her work, reveals her motivations for selecting and orchestrating specific semiotic resources to represent and express particular meanings that realized her objectives as a sign-maker. Overall, the descriptions of the pedagogy featured during the research and the student’s ocean threat comics demonstrate how the development of student knowledge about elements of visual art and design, and conventions of the medium of comics can inform and deepen students’ semiotic work of comprehending, interpreting and designing science comics.

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On The Significance Of Disagreement: Stanley Cavell And Ordinary Language Philosophy

How the West Was Won ◽

10.1163/ej.9789004184961.i-422.78 ◽

2010 ◽

pp. 239-253

Keyword(s):

Ordinary Language ◽

Ordinary Language Philosophy ◽

Language Philosophy ◽

Stanley Cavell

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Absent Subjects and Empty Centers: Eichendorff's Romantic Phantasmagoria and Schumann's Liederkreis, Op. 39

19th-Century Music ◽

10.1525/ncm.2017.40.3.201 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 40 (3) ◽

pp. 201-222

Author(s):

Benedict Taylor

Keyword(s):

Extreme Case ◽

Literary Production ◽

Prose Fiction ◽

Question Mark ◽

Loss Of Self ◽

Aesthetic Understanding ◽

Subjective Identity ◽

Vacant Space

A recurring theme in the reception of Schumann's Eichendorff Liederkreis is the question mark over its sense of narrative continuity and the presence (or otherwise) of a central protagonist. Up until now, however, scarcely any attempt has been made to view these features in the context of Eichendorff's wider literary production. This article proposes applying an Eichendorffian aesthetic to Schumann's op. 39, viewing its phantasmagoric interconnections, absence of clear narrative order, sense of temporal dislocation and persistent theme of the loss of self as profoundly reflecting the concerns of Eichendorff's prose fiction. Neither the view that Schumann's cycle does possess a unified narrative and central protagonist, nor the converse, that it should be seen as a disparate group of songs, is adequate. Instead, it is the tension between the two views that emerges as crucial in coming to an aesthetic understanding of the cycle. Schumann's procedure, in juxtaposing a number of poems drawn from disparate works, presents an extreme case whereby narrative and subjective identity are put to the test, and the listener is invited to fill the vacant space left by the withdrawal of a unifying subject with his or her own sense of subjectivity.

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Stanley Cavell and Literary Skepticism.

The Philosophical Review ◽

10.2307/2186089 ◽

1992 ◽

Vol 101 (3) ◽

pp. 712

Author(s):

John Koethe ◽

Michael Fischer

Keyword(s):

Stanley Cavell

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I Love You. Who Are You? The Strategy of Drama in Recognition Scenes

PMLA ◽

10.2307/461948 ◽

1977 ◽

Vol 92 (2) ◽

pp. 297-306

Author(s):

Helene Keyssar

Keyword(s):

King Lear ◽

Audience Participation ◽

Stanley Cavell ◽

The World ◽

The Spectator ◽

Critical Process

Audience participation in theater often obscures or confuses the magical nature of the activity of theater. The uniqueness of this activity is centered in the separateness of the world of the play from the world of the audience, as Stanley Cavell remarks. The importance of such separateness becomes vivid in recognition scenes which are the structural core of most drama. Aristotle perceives the importance of recognition scenes, but does not show adequately what such scenes do to the spectator. The recognition scenes in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s King Lear reveal drama’s special ability to allow the spectator to acknowledge another while himself remaining private. The critical process involved in coming to such an understanding of drama, while similar to some elements of structuralistic analysis, focuses more directly on a concern with the patterns of relationship between play and audience. My methodology corresponds to Stanley Fish’s “affective” stylistics.

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Cavell as Mentor

Conversations The Journal of Cavellian Studies ◽

10.18192/cjcs.vi7.4289 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 60-64

Author(s):

Siane Ngai

Keyword(s):

Stanley Cavell ◽

Dissertation Committee ◽

Looking Back

I was a Grad student in English at Harvard in the mid-90s, but physically there for just three years, anxious to move to Brooklyn for a relationship as soon as I became ABD. In that brief but intense period of time, I tried to take as many courses offered by Stanley Cavell as possible. In my last year, I asked him to be a member of my dissertation committee. Looking back I’m still flooded with gratitude (and astonishment) by the fact that he said yes.

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