Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory (Cultural Memory in the Present) - Hardcover

Cavell, Stanley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080477014X ISBN 13: 9780804770149

Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

An autobiography in the form of a philosophical diary, Little Did I Know's underlying motive is to describe the events of a life that produced the kind of writing associated with Stanley Cavell's name. Cavell recounts his journey from early childhood in Atlanta, Georgia, through musical studies at UC Berkeley and Julliard, his subsequent veering off into philosophy at UCLA, his Ph.D. studies at Harvard, and his half century of teaching. Influential people from various fields figure prominently or in passing over the course of this memoir. J.L. Austin, Ernest Bloch, Roger Sessions, Thomas Kuhn, Robert Lowell, Rogers Albritton, Seymour Shifrin, John Rawls, Bernard Williams, W. V. O. Quine, and Jacques Derrida are no longer with us; but Cavell also pays homage to the living: Michael Fried, John Harbison, Rose Mary Harbison, Kurt Fischer, Milton Babbitt, Thompson Clarke, John Hollander, Hilary Putnam, Sandra Laugier, Belle Randall, and Terrence Malick. The drift of his narrative also registers the decisiveness of the relatively unknown and the purely accidental. Cavell's life has produced a trail of some eighteen published books that range from treatments of individual writers like Wittgenstein, Austin, Emerson, Thoreau, Heidegger, Shakespeare, and Beckett to studies in aesthetics, epistemology, moral and political philosophy, cinema, opera, and religion.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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

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LITTLE DID I KNOW

Excerpts from MemoryBy Stanley Cavell

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7014-9

Contents

Part 1 (July 2 through July 17, 2003).............................1Part 2 (July 20 through July 28, 2003)............................54Part 3 (July 29 through August 15, 2003)..........................96Part 4 (August 16 through September 3, 2003)......................146Part 5 (September 4 through December 8, 2003).....................177Part 6 (April 8 through April 16, 2004)...........................206Part 7 (April 17 through April 25, 2004)..........................239Part 9 (May 25 through June 3, 2004)..............................333Part 10 (June 4 through June 15, 2004)............................382Part 11 (June 16 through June 25, 2004)...........................421Part 12 (June 26 through August 1, 2004)..........................459Part 13 (August 9 through August 18, 2004)........................488Part 14 (August 19 through September 1, 2004).....................518Index of Names....................................................549Acknowledgments...................................................558

Chapter One

Part 1

July 2, 2003

The catheterization of my heart will no longer be postponed. My cardiologist announces that he has lost confidence in his understanding of my condition so far based on reports of what I surmise as symptoms of angina and of the noninvasive monitoring allowed by X-rays and by the angiograms produced in stress tests. We must actually look at what is going on inside the heart.

Even if I had not eight years ago officially retired from teaching, summer months for teachers are not ones in which routine obligations can serve to shape the days in which life is suspended until the hospital date for the procedure is settled and the time comes to pack a bag for an overnight stay. Apart from learning of the risks in the procedure's actual performance, there are the frightening statistics (frightening even when reasonably favorable) that doctors are obliged to convey to you, not alone of problems incurred in or by the procedure itself, but those of its possible outcomes. In the instance of catheterization the possible outcomes are mainly three: one, that no further surgical intervention is necessary, so that either a change of diagnosis or of medication is in order; two, that instruments roughly of the sort involved in catheterization can be (re)inserted to open and to repair where necessary arterial blockage; three, that the blockage is severe enough, or located in such a way, that bypass surgery is required. (The possibility that nothing can be done was not voiced.) In a previous such period of awaiting surgery, a dozen years ago, I controlled or harnessed my anxiety by reading. I had found that I resisted the efforts of a novel to attract me from my world; I needed the absorption of labor rather than that of narrative. I discovered that reading a book by Vladimir Jankelevitch on the music of Debussy that I had discovered in Paris and brought back a few months earlier, meaning to read it at once (I was planning a set of three lectures, in the last of which the Debussy-Maeterlinck Pellas and Mlisande would play a pivotal role), effectively concentrated my attention, partly because of the beauty of the musical illustrations along with the very effort it required for my rusty musicianship to imagine the sounds of the illustrations unfamiliar to me that Jankelevitch includes in his text, partly because of the specificity and fascination of his words, and partly also because I was kept busy consulting a French dictionary for the evidently endless words in French that name, for example, the effects of sunlight and of clouds on moving water.

This time I am not inclined to house my anxiety as a secondary gain of reading, but rather by a departure in my writing, to begin learning whether I can write my way into and through the anxiety by telling the story of my life. (Or is it the other way around-that I am using the mortal threat of the procedure, and of what it may reveal, to justify my right to tell my story, in the way in which I wish to tell it? What could this mean-my story is surely mine to tell or not to tell according to my desire? But of course the story is not mine alone but eventually includes the lives of all who have been incorporated in mine.) I have formed such an intention many times in recent years, and there have been autobiographical moments in my writing from the beginning of the first essays I still use, and from the time of the book I called A Pitch of Philosophy I have sought explicitly to consider why philosophy, of a certain ambition, tends perpetually to intersect the autobiographical.

But I have until now been unwilling, or uninterested, to tell a story that begins with my birth on the south side of Atlanta, Georgia-where most of the Jews in the city lived who derived from the Eastern European migrations at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century (I believe I never learned where the German Jewish immigrants assumed the aristocrats of the Jewish population had recollected themselves in Atlanta, having brought with them to these shores on the whole some wealth and more in the way of secular educations than their Eastern European counterparts and, critically, having arrived in America and apparently made themselves at home a couple of generations earlier)-three years before the stock market crash that began the Great Depression; the only child of a mother who was next to the oldest of six children, all but one of them musicians, two of them professional, and of a father, a decade older than my mother, among the youngest of seven children, so that when I was born my father's oldest sibling was over fifty years old and that sibling's second-oldest child was the same age as my mother. The artistic temperament of my mother's family, the Segals, left them on the whole, with the exception of my mother and her baby brother, Mendel, doubtfully suited to an orderly, successful existence in the new world; the orthodox, religious sensibility of my father's family, the Goldsteins, produced a second generation-some twenty-two first cousins of mine-whose solidarity and severity of expectation produced successful dentists, lawyers, and doctors, pillars of the Jewish community, and almost without exception attaining local, some of them national, some even a certain international, prominence. The house I lived in for my first seven years was also home, in addition to my mother and father, to my mother's invalid mother, and to two of my mother's brothers. When my minimal family of three moved away to the north side of the city, a feeling of bereftness and bewilderment came over me that lasted for the better, or the worst, part of the ensuing ten years, which involved moving between Atlanta and Sacramento, California, a total of five times across the country, as my father's efforts to maintain small shops, starting with jewelry stores, successively failed. We were in California at the last of those transcontinental train rides (the first, in 1935, when I was nine years old, whose memory dwarfs the later ones, took what was described as four days and three nights, on seats covered in green velour that did not recline, stretching out [as it were] on which to sleep at night meant...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 080477014X
• ISBN 13: 9780804770149
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 557
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland