Teaching and Studying Literature in Dark Times: The Timeliness of Stanley Cavell’s Perfectionism

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Abstract Professors of literature and the other humanities have long been concerned about shrinking public and institutional support for their teaching and scholarship. For many of these scholars, anxiety about the health of their discipline reinforces apprehensiveness about the future of a world beset by such threats as climate change and accelerating attacks on democracy. To address these concerns, this article turns to the American philosopher Stanley Cavell’s defense of Emersonian perfectionism, in which Cavell takes on the role Ralph Waldo Emerson assigned himself in “The American Scholar”: “to cheer, to raise, and to guide” others embarked on the “slow, unhonored, and unpaid” path of intellectual work. Cavell’s reaffirmation of Emersonian perfectionism reminds us what literary and philosophical study can offer, even during dark times, when its value seems most in doubt.