Stanley Cavell, Literature, and Film: The Idea of America, recently published in Routledge's Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature series, assumes the challenge of approaching Cavell's take on America in an interdisciplinary manner. More than any of the individual contributions, the anthology as a whole allows us to glimpse how Cavell's concept of America overlaps with its own homegrown philosophy as embodied in its transcendentalist writers and Hollywood directors.

Several contributors to the anthology discuss the significance of the historical context in which Cavell's earliest publications appeared (e.g. Anderson, Kelly, Ray, Rhu). Most notably, the concept of America was first brought up against the backdrop of the war in Vietnam. Áine Kelly's introduction draws attention to Cavell's diagnoses of America's involvement in Vietnam by drawing a surprising analogy with King Lear's destructive embrace of scepticism and avoidance of love resulting from a failure to acknowledge his own separateness. By pertaining to the sense of failure in pursuit of Manifest Destiny and to the collapse of America's narrative of a harmonious union with itself, Cavell invokes the sense of deficit that had prevailed from Poe to Henry Adams (as argued in Hansen's chapter) or Henry James (Boudreau, Taylor). It may, therefore, seem all the more surprising that Cavell, in his search for a homegrown philosophy, turns to the American transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau and to directors of comedy films from Hollywood's golden age (Sturges, Capra, Cukor), rather than to these darker nineteenth-century writers.

These writers and directors help Cavell to distil a philosophy embodied in specific performances, encounters, exchanges (Taylor). In the best contribution to the anthology, “Cavell, Thoreau and the Movies,” Robert B. Ray situates this methodological specificity in another historically relevant context. Discussing Cavell's take on cinema, Ray points out that Cavell's tendency to “let the films themselves teach us how to look at them and how to think about them” (quoted from Pursuits of Happiness (1981), 10) runs counter to the post-May ’68 attitude of French and British film critics. The latter focussed on the political implications of cinema as an “apparatus” by arguing that realist and Hollywood films are but the expressions of prevailing ideology. Ray counts this “smug superiority” as one more example of what Wittgenstein had diagnosed as a fatal craving for generality and its contempt for the particular case. In The World Viewed (1973), Cavell goes against the grain not only by embracing photographic realism and Hollywood films, but by also treating each movie on its own peculiar merits, with description of significant scenes functioning as the key to that method. The crucial role of description also explains Cavell's attraction to Thoreau. Acknowledging that Walden may seem long and boring, Cavell insists that its countless descriptions of seemingly irrelevant details are of philosophical significance. For the significance of the moments of our lives is not normally evident at the moment of their immediately lived experience either. Herein lies the importance of description, and especially of what Ray calls film's descriptive automatism. For while film can, by way of camera movement, editing, etc., draw attention to specific details, it also knows, by virtue of its automatic recording mechanism, how not to draw attention to them. Details in a film may be concealed as much as revealed. Film therefore shares philosophy's preoccupation with the way in which we may miss our lives.

Precisely because our lives and encounters are not transparent to ourselves, and because of our fundamental separateness and embodiment, Cavell turns from Thoreau to Emerson's moral perfectionism. As David M. Robinson and Garrett Steward point out, this moral outlook does not assume an attainable state of ultimate perfection or transparency, but it does posit that each specific case of human communication and action may make us less dark to ourselves and to others, that personal and political union may be possible not by overcoming, but by acknowledging, separateness. The concept of America is likewise one that Cavell refuses to ground in the actual present. Not that he denies his disappointment in the actual state of “This New Yet Unapproachable America,” but, as with all perfectionist aspirations, if there is no utopian state to be attained, there is still the continuous need for making the continent and country less dark in a series of abandonments (or aversions, to use the Emersonian phrase), not away from politics and society, but by demanding a renewed approach of them. This concept of America thus overlaps with its own philosophy, extracted by Cavell from its transcendentalist and Hollywood writers.