Encountering Cavell in the College Classroom

Abstract

When I received the invitation from David LaRocca to contribute to this special issue of Conversations, to commemorate and celebrate Stanley Cavell’s life and thought, I felt flummoxed, overwhelmed by the possibilities. There are so many different reasons I feel gratitude, deep gratitude, for Stanley, so many ways his writings and voice have left a profound mark on my intellectual development and career and even daily life. What text or moment or effect should I single out? Where to begin? Indeed, if I had not stumbled across Must We Mean What We Say? three years into graduate school, despairing, as I was at that time, of ever feeling at home in the academic world of literary studies (this was in the late ’90s in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where New Historicism was very much enjoying its heyday), I think there’s a good chance that I would never have finished my Ph.D. I had great respect for my teachers and peers, but as hard as I tried (and I did try very hard; after all, it felt like the very possibility of a career was at stake), I could not see myself reflected in their scholarly interests or outlooks.