From: rhh@alice.att.com (r hardin)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: Re: john wesley hardin
Keywords: was a friend to the poor
Date: 17 Apr 92 15:58:55 GMT
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill NJ



Joe Green writes:
>The difference is that Cavell derives some comfort from this because
>he somehow conceives of the work as an autonomous object with these
>counter-meanings already inscribed within it.  The work gestures
>its own deconstruction.  The difference seems to be what is emphasized.
>Cavell calls attention to the metaphysical object and is comforted
>that these other meanings are THERE.  Feminism emphasizes the
>struggle necessary to engender the suspicion that the work offers
>itself up to counter-interpretation and insists on examining
>the actual effect of the work on readers, on the audience.  Who is
>it exactly that sees or feels that the work actually provides
>a way to resist its own ideology?  How did they get THERE?

No, it's more serious.

``The genre of melodrama that I derive from the genre of remarriage
comedy, entitling it after its most accomplished instance, Max
Ophuls' Letter from an Unknown Woman (and including Gaslight,
Now Voyager, and Stella Dallas among its members, films from
the same years in Hollywood as the remarriage comedies) specifically
negates this possibility of conversation between a woman and the
men there are, which means that these films do not, with remarkable
exceptions, end in marriage for the woman, certainly not
marriage as it stands.  What replaces conversation in the melodramas
is a heavy, symbolic irony.  These films have, on the whole, been received
and remembered as tales enforcing the highest virtue of women to be
noble self-sacrifice - to the needs of a man and of children, that is,
as so-called women's films or tearjerkers.  But it seems to me fully
evident that the women in these films are shown to be possessed
of the moral sensibility and intelligence from which a film derives
its power of judgment, and that the power of the central
woman's irony condemns the society that enforces its conforming
view of sacrifice upon her.  Why this counter-cultural
pressure is denied by the culture that has produced these films may
perhaps seem obvious.  But then, how it is that this is what the films
show - how they have been produced by the culture to be beloved yet
to represent their own rejection by the culture, our rejected selves -
opens the question of what film is.''

(conditions handsome and unhandsome, p 105 ``the conversation of justice'')

that represents our rejected selves.  I ask without any irony why they
were called tearjerkers.

>>Cavell's tradition has been called uniquely American, which touches
>>on his earlier remark that the distance of high and low culture
>>in America is very different from Europe, ``a fact that Adorno
>>is incapable of grasping.''

>I'll stick with William James.  I can't see what is uniquely
>American about it unless the fact that it seems new but is
>derivative is what is uniquely American.

The hardest thing that Cavell does is to show how to read Emerson,
as probably Nietzsche read Emerson, about justice.

A question of an American voice stilled.
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems