Not exactly a philosopher, not exactly a literary theorist and not exactly a cultural critic, Stanley Cavell has always occupied a unique disciplinary position. Reflecting his contributions to the extra-philosophical areas of poetry, tragedy, opera and film, “cultural critic” is possibly the most accurate of these inaccurate labels; still, it is also the most dissatisfying, missing as it does the specifically philosophical standards and traditions to which Cavell holds his work responsive. Considering the influence of Cavell's work in a particular disciplinary matrix – in this case, the field of literary criticism – is one way to settle or at least unsettle again such contestations of intellectual identity.

As the editors of this particular collection note, however, while literary critics in a very general sense have always granted their respect (in a very general sense) for Cavell's work, this wide-ranging approval has never exactly equated to literary-critical impact. To his literary-philosophical contemporaries (Derrida, Foucault and Lacan among them), Cavell has never enjoyed a comparable notoriety. It is a central purpose of Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies – a collection of specially commissioned pieces from contributors mostly based in US departments of English – to address both the causes and the consequences of such ambivalent reception.

As always, it is tempting to set aside the editors’ introduction (presumably a general assessment of Cavell's career to date, presumably followed by a perfunctory sketching of the essays to follow) as largely immaterial. Eldridge and Rhie, however, are never so easily dismissed. What is offered in the opening pages of their book is a fluent rearticulation of Cavell's uniquely diagnostic and therapeutic technique (the achievement of ordinary language eloquently described as “a sense of arrival of felt rightness” (4)), a subtle engagement with the currents of scepticism running throughout his oeuvre, a compelling account of why we should take his modernist project seriously. Particularly provocative is the editors’ discussion of Cavell's humanism as a site for literary-critical resistance and the strange “aura of untimeliness” (5) that has always attended his work.

The fourteen essays that follow are divided into two sections, “Principles” and “Practices.” However, the provisional nature of any split between theory and practice, in Cavell's work as in the work of his respondents, is immediately granted. With due attendance to the usual suspects (Kant and Wittgenstein, Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Emerson), the collection stakes out fresh intellectual territory with contributions involving Cavell with Simone de Beauvoir, William Carlos Williams, Primo Levi, Charlotte Brontë, Joseph Conrad, J. M. Coetzee, Thomas Pynchon and N. Scott Momaday. Naomi Scheman's chapter, “A Storied World: On Meeting and Being Met,” is particularly welcome for its attentiveness to gender. Cavell's women, Scheman contends, “haunt the texts, rather than inhabiting them fully” (100). Moreover, Cavell's “gendering of skepticism” (100) troubles not only the figure of the woman philosopher but the possibilities for philosophy more generally. “Anxieties about saying we” (96), as Scheman writes, raise the very pertinent question of any one person's right (philosophical, political or moral) to speak for another. Robert Chodat's “Empiricism, Exhaustion, and Meaning What We Say” addresses the very obvious lacuna in Cavell's turn to literature (his tendency not to engage directly with the contemporary novel), while Sarah Beckwith's piece on Shakespeare and confession is a welcome addition to current scholarship on Cavell and J. L. Austin.

There is a lovely moment at the end of Garrett Stewart's otherwise highly challenging “The Word Viewed: Skepticism Degree Zero,” where he claims for Cavell the discovery that the punning of Edgar Allan Poe presents “no longer just the disaster of the unmeant but the present possibility of the unthought, exploratory rather than foreclosing” (91). Such inflection of a central Cavellian theme (notwithstanding his appeal to the language of the everyday, he still contends that we are never entirely in control of the words that we use) is a timely reminder of the interpretive richness of Cavell's prose. Moreover, as Stewart himself recognizes, further exploration along these literary-philosophical lines will advance only in the wake of Cavell's remarkably original contributions to philosophy, to cultural criticism, and to literary theory. Such efforts go forward, as Stewart writes, in Cavell's “honor, his shadow, and his debt” (91). Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies is a superb contribution to Cavell scholarship. On finishing this collection of essays, indeed, one is left with a final impression of privilege, of special intimacy with those interlocutors whose career-long engagement with Cavell continues with sincerity on the page before us.