Secular Mysteries: Stanley Cavell and English Romanticism by Edward T. Duffy

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 625 helped to plan. Ross was the leader of one of these voyages, but turned back when he thought he saw a range of mountains blocking the passage. Barrow was convinced that Ross invented the mountains as an excuse for his own cowardice, and so began a twenty-year feud between the two men. This material will be unfamiliar to most literary scholars of Romanti­ cism, and it reminds us that the periodicals contained much other material besides their reviews of poetry and novels. In his articles, Barrow is caught between his contempt for John Ross and his almost fanatical conviction that the North-West Passage exists and that a British ship will discover it. But Wheatley shows how Barrow’s discourse also constructs and interro­ gates an “Arctic sublime.” “John Barrow does not seek transcendence whether as thematic preoccupation or rhetorical effect,” she concludes, “but it finds him” (173). Kim Wheatley begins her chapter on the Watt Tyler controversy with the words “The story has often been told, though usually as background rather than foreground” (21). Romantic Feuds joins several recent studies that restore periodical writing to the foreground and argue for its constitu­ tive role in the emergence of Romanticism as an intellectual formation, as well as its historical importance in the print culture ofthe period. Carefully researched from many sources, and well informed about existing criticism, it deserves to be read not only by scholars specializing in periodicals, but by Romanticists more widely. Tom Mole University of Edinburgh, UK Edward T. Duffy. Secular Mysteries: Stanley Caved and English Romanticism. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Pp. 304. $120. In Secular Mysteries: Stanley Cavell and English Romanticism, Edward T. Duffy connects three romantic writers, each of whom, he writes, argues for the importance of attention to ordinary words and common experience. All three, according to Duffy, suggest that an account of the good life requires this attention because it allows intimacy with the world. Two of these ro­ mantics are William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley, but the one discussed first is the contemporary philosopher of language Stanley Cavell, whom Duffy reframes relative to the English romantic tradition. Over the past fifty years, Cavell has written about Shakespeare’s trage­ dies, golden-age Hollywood comedies, fiction by Henry James, im­ provisational jazz, Continental philosophy by Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida, and, perhaps most famously, the essays of SiR, 52 (Winter 2013) 626 BOOK REVIEWS Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Although Cavell fo­ cuses on the specifically American, he touches on British Romanticism, including important readings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and William Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode in 1994’s In Quest of the Ordinary, and Duffy’s book grows out of this brief contact. Duffy argues that Cavell’s work is transatlantically romantic, and in Secular Mysteries, he shows how it shares concerns, goals, and techniques with the poetry of Wordsworth and Shelley. Once Duffy draws this connection, it seems strange that Cavell, one of the most important thinkers writing out of ordinary language philosophy, has not written more about the poets who sought to distinguish their project as the “language really spoken by men.” Duffy’s book is an important expedition connecting these figurative and literal continents. (William Desmond’s essay, “A Second Primavera: Cavell, German Philosophy, and Romanticism,” in Stanley Cavell, a 2003 collection of essays edited by Richard Eldridge, is another. Surprisingly, Duffy does not mention it.) Duffy’s book divides into three sections: the first several chapters argue for Cavell’s relevance to British Romanticism, the next two chapters discuss Wordsworth, and the final three chapters are on Shelley. Only the first third of Secular Mysteries focuses on Cavell, but the con­ ceptual framing for the book as a whole comes from his philosophy. Cavell began his career as a student and critic of J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the basis of much of his thought is the argument that at­ tention to our ordinary language contains the remedy for the trenchant philosophical problem of skepticism. Analytic philosophers from David Hume to G. E. Moore have argued that we cannot know the mind of...