"Stanley Cavell's American Dream is an insightful, original contribution to Shakespeare criticism, film criticism, and to our theoretical understanding of the relationship between the two great arts." — William Rothman, editor of Cavell on Film and coauthor of Reading Cavell's The World Viewed
 
"Stanley Cavell's American Dream moves from discussions of Cavell's philosophy to readings of Walker Percy, Harold Bloom, Shakespeare, Emerson, and contemporary novelist Jane Smiley, traversing institutional divides with a grace and lucidity which recalls the best writing of such stylistically-gifted critics as Hugh Kenner and Alfred Kazin. Rewarding and pleasurable to read."
— R.M. Berry, author of Frank
 
"A generous invitation for readers to profit from Cavell's Emersonian ways of combining Shakespeare's evergreen worlds with those of Hollywood's Golden Age."
— Stephen Mulhall, author of Stanley Cavell: Philosophy's Recounting of the Ordinary and editor of The Cavell Reader
 
"Rhu shows how Cavell's philosophy is inseparable from his interest in Shakespeare and Hollywood and so, indirectly, how the interests of an important philosopher are just like anyone else's, and how philosophy for Cavell represents one of the few remaining possibilities of expressing one's simultaneous affection for both Hamlet and North by Northwest."
— Miguel Tamen, author of Friends of Interpretable Objects
 
"A work for every Shakespearean—experts and amateurs, teachers and their students, whom this book will delight and instruct. Its eloquence and accessiblity make it ideal for graduate and undergraduate classes."
— John Tobin, coeditor of The Riverside Shakespeare
 
"This book brightly illuminates the work of Shakespeare, Emerson and Hollywood melodrama and remarriage comedy as well as the work of the thinker who has given us such extraordinary pathways into them."
— Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays
 
Lawrence F. Rhu is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of The Genesis of Tasso’s Narrative Theory: English Translations of the Early Poetics and a Comparative Study of Their Significance.
 
Stanley Cavell is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Harvard University . His recent publications include A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises; Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin and Derrida; Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life; and Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes
 
256Pages
ISBN:0-8232-2596-8/978-0-8232-2596-5
Hardcover $55.00

For further information, please contact Kate O'Brien at Fordham University Press: bkaobrien@fordham.edu