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(3 reviews) Author: Stanley Cavell ISBN : 9780226098166 New from $11.45 Format: PDF
Download PRETITLE Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman POSTTITLE from 4shared, mediafire, hotfile, and mirror link (3 reviews) Author: Stanley Cavell ISBN : 9780226098166 New from $11.45 Format: PDFWhat is marriage? Can a relationship dedicated to equality, friendship, and mutual education flower in an atmosphere of romance? What are the paths between loving another and knowing another? Stanley Cavell identified a genre of classic American films that engaged these questions in his study of comedies of remarriage, Pursuits of Happiness. With Contesting Tears, Cavell demonstrates that a contrasting genre, which he calls "the melodrama of the unknown woman," shares a surprising number and weave of concerns with those comedies.
Cavell provides close readings of four melodramas he finds definitive of the genre: Letter from an Unknown Woman, Gaslight, Now Voyager, and Stella Dallas. The women in these melodramas, like the women in the comedies, demand equality, shared education, and transfiguration, exemplifying for Cavell a moral perfectionism he identifies as Emersonian. But unlike the comedies, which portray a quest for a shared existence of expressiveness and joy, the melodramas trace instead the woman's recognition that in this quest she is isolated. Part of the melodrama concerns the various ways the men in the films (and the audiences of the films) interpret and desire to force the woman's consequent inaccessibility.
"Film is an interest of mine," Stanley Cavell has written, "or say a love, not separate from my interest in, or love of, philosophy." In Contesting Tears Cavell once again brilliantly unites his two loves, using detailed and perceptive musings on melodrama to reflect on philosophical problems of skepticism, psychoanalysis, and perfectionism. As he shows, the fascination and intelligence of such great stars as
Ingrid Bergman, Bette Davis, and Barbara Stanwyck illuminate, as they are illuminated by, the topics and events of these beloved and enduring films.
Cavell provides close readings of four melodramas he finds definitive of the genre: Letter from an Unknown Woman, Gaslight, Now Voyager, and Stella Dallas. The women in these melodramas, like the women in the comedies, demand equality, shared education, and transfiguration, exemplifying for Cavell a moral perfectionism he identifies as Emersonian. But unlike the comedies, which portray a quest for a shared existence of expressiveness and joy, the melodramas trace instead the woman's recognition that in this quest she is isolated. Part of the melodrama concerns the various ways the men in the films (and the audiences of the films) interpret and desire to force the woman's consequent inaccessibility.
"Film is an interest of mine," Stanley Cavell has written, "or say a love, not separate from my interest in, or love of, philosophy." In Contesting Tears Cavell once again brilliantly unites his two loves, using detailed and perceptive musings on melodrama to reflect on philosophical problems of skepticism, psychoanalysis, and perfectionism. As he shows, the fascination and intelligence of such great stars as
Ingrid Bergman, Bette Davis, and Barbara Stanwyck illuminate, as they are illuminated by, the topics and events of these beloved and enduring films.
- Paperback: 272 pages
- Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (February 1, 1997)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0226098168
- ISBN-13: 978-0226098166
- Product Dimensions: 0.7 x 5.9 x 9.1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman PDF
To say that Cavell's prose is challenging is charitable, at best. True, his ideas are solid and any good, insightful work requires effort to understand, but Cavell seems to circle around himself in a rhetorical spiral of namedropping and navel-gazing with an irksome regularity. He frequently explores ill-transitioned tangets with no warning or reason apprent, and the overall read becomes fractured and one is left wondering why. This said, when one can extract the ore of Cavell's reason, it is pure gold. Truly, a mixed bag.By A Customer
No, I haven't read them all, but this is a severely disappointing follow-up to Cavell's near-perfect previous volume on Hollywood film, "Pursuits of Happiness" (a collection of essays on, mostly, screwball comedies). Especially given that the idea for the volume is such a great one, foreshadowed in an earlier essay (included here, on "Letter from an Unknown Woman") in which Cavell suggestively drew a connection between Hollywood melodrama and Freud's early work on hysteria as a new way of getting at our author's trademark obsession, epistemological problems as human problems. But what made "Pursuits of Happiness" such a tremendous work of film criticism is that whatever Cavell's pretensions, one always believed that he loved the movies he was writing about. Here that feeling is missing; instead you get the feeling he doesn't understand the point of most of these movies at all, and even (shudder!) that his attitude to the genre is condescending. Well, no critic or philosopher can do everything. A sorry introduction to either Cavell or the great Hollywood genre of the women's picture, which still awaits the kind of exposition that Cavell could have given it, at his best. The two stars are for the excellent essay on "Now, Voyager"; the essay on "Gaslight" is an interesting philosophical read, with very little to do with the film; the essay on "Stella Dallas" should be avoided like the plague.By A Customer
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