Comedy Of Remarriage Research Articles

Reconsidering remarriage: Stanley Cavell and the vicissitudes of genre

ABSTRACT In recent years, Stanley Cavell has become one of the canonical reference points for film scholars. In particular, his work on ‘comedies of remarriage’ has become one of the most fertile arenas of contemporary scholarship in film studies. However, Cavell’s work on remarriage comedy has rarely been subjected to criticism. For the most part, scholars interested in Cavell’s work on remarriage comedy have either sought to elaborate on his readings of the seven principal films which for him make up the core of the genre, or they have sought to expand the genre by incorporating additional classical or contemporary Hollywood romantic comedies. In this article, I reconsider Cavell’s canonical work on the subject, and critique and provide alternatives to what are to my mind the most pressing problems in Cavell’s conception of remarriage comedy, problems which fall into three broad categories: theoretical problems, historical problems, and critical problems. In so doing, I hope to provide better theoretical models, broader historical understanding, and more nuanced criticism vis-à-vis the genre of remarriage comedy in and beyond classical Hollywood cinema.

There’s Always More Show

This paper casts the television series BoJack Horseman as a challenge to the genre that Stanley Cavell calls “the comedy of remarriage.” First, it is argued that the last season of the series explicitly suggests but finally contradicts the narrative pattern of the comedy of remarriage. Then, the impossibility of remarriage in BoJack Horseman is traced back to some structural features of the medium of television and its relationship to time. Finally, the impossibility of remarriage in BoJack Horseman is related to the capacity of the medium of television to enable self-defeating fictions which challenge fiction as a cultural institution.

A Psychoanalysis of Milk: The Case of Alfred Hitchcock

A Psychoanalysis of Milk: The Case of Alfred Hitchcock

Three by Three: Lisa Cholodenko’s Attachment Trilogy

Lisa Cholodenko’s three films High Art (US, 1998), Laurel Canyon (US, 2002), and The Kids Are All Right (US, 2010) all tell the same story: a sexual and emotional ingenue arrives in a tightly circumscribed social world that both resembles and departs from a conventional family. At its heart is an established couple whose seemingly secure erotic bond is marked by deep ambivalence. This bond is stretched beyond recognition as it bends to the presence of the sexual outsider, who is first incorporated into, then ejected from, the pseudofamilial world. Though irreparably altered, the established couple survives—and may even be strengthened by—the sexual, spatial, and professional infidelity that forms the central plot of the film. No longer disavowed, the ambivalence that has marked the couple’s formation from the outset is now under-stood to be fundamental to their ongoing attachment. Whether the relationships are straight, gay, or bisexual; maternal, paternal, or filial; motivated, situational, or opportunistic; whether the worlds they inhabit are those of art photography, popular music, or medicine; whether their compulsions are addictive, obsessive, or narcissistic; the common story is basically the same, as is the lesson that attends it: attachment is always ambivalent. That is part of its satisfaction. End of story. Or, begin again. This article invokes Stanley Cavell’s classic account of the Hollywood comedy of remarriage in order to place Cholodenko’s trilogy within a wider popular conversation about attachment and ambivalence in the era of marriage equality.

윌리엄 셰익스피어 유산의 영화적 전유: 할리우드 재혼 코미디 ― 스탠리 카벨의 해석을 중심으로 ―

윌리엄 셰익스피어 유산의 영화적 전유: 할리우드 재혼 코미디 ― 스탠리 카벨의 해석을 중심으로 ―

Mike Nichols: Sex, Language, and the Reinvention of Psychological RealismKyleStevens. Oxford University Press, 2015.

Nichols: Sex, and the Reinvention of Psychological Realism Kyle Stevens. Oxford University Press, 2015.This special book tells the fascinating tale of Nichols, an extraordinary man who made many major contributions to the American stage and cinema as an actor and producer as well as a theater and film director. book started as a biographical doctoral dissertation by its author, Kyle Stevens, a graduate student at the time at the University of Pittsburgh, and ended coincidentally very near the time of the death of Nichols in New York on November 19, 2014.The German-born Nichols came to the United States as a young boy where he lived in New York while attending private schools. His career began in the 1950s in Chicago, where he attended the University of Chicago and joined a local improvisational comedy group called Compass Players, which later became the legendary entertainment phenomenon known as Second City. Among his colleagues here was Elaine May, a very talented young actress with whom he formed the highly successful dynamic comedy duo known as Nichols and May.Looking next at the book's contents, we find that its 202 pages of text contain an introductory chapter, Mike Nichols and the Politics of Character, and a concluding chapter, Nichols's Cinema of Conversation, as well as five chapters in between. first of the five is Nothing Goes Unheard: Nichols and May, Improvisation, and the Skewing of Language, and this chapter is followed by Nichols's Comedy of Remarriage. Next appears The Graduate and the Subversion of Silence, followed by Carnal Knowledge: Close-Up, Duration, and Affective Impotence. Fifth and last is The Minds of Chameleons: Nichols and Streep.While Nichols will be remembered for individual feats that he accomplished in the theater and cinema, it is the staggering number of his major successes in a variety of artistic arenas over a lifetime of work that make him not just special, but spectacular.Starting with his early work with Elaine May, we find that their improvisational acts on Broadway in the late 1950s produced three successful albums, with the debut album winning them a Grammy Award.Soon after their act was dissolved in the early sixties, Nichols tried his hand at directing plays and soon found that he had a talent for this as well, after directing the actors in Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park in 1963 and Odd Couple in 1965. …

“The Great Sea Voyage Which Marriage Can Be”

This essay takes up the challenge, issued by Fredric Jameson in a 1976 minnesota review essay, to become attentive to the “presence of some Utopian content even within the most degraded and degrading type of commercial product.” It does so through a reading of the Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore film 50 First Dates (2004) as an example of the utopian film genre that Stanley Cavell identifies as “the comedy of remarriage.” It further draws upon the insights of Alain Badiou to theorize a larger schema of related practices that I name the “evental genres” before exploring in some detail how the deep fidelity practiced by the central couple in the film — most powerfully on display in its unexpected climax — develops a concrete figure of the day-by-day labors, the unending process of remaking, renewal, and reinvention required in any authentic marriage and hence any truly utopian project.

An atheistic sense to Stanley Hauerwas’s theology

This essay argues that Stanley Hauerwas’ Christian ethics exemplifies a manner of speech that does not premise divine activity as necessary for theological judgment. An anti-constantinian reticence regarding divine activity sits at the heart of Hauerwas’ work, giving it an atheistic sense emblematic of secularized cultural conditions, marking his theology as decidedly baptist. The essay takes the form of a sustained engagement with Nicholas Healy’s incisive critique that Hauerwas disastrously joins together what should remain apart, what David Kelsey distinguishes as logics of belief and logics of coming to belief. After passing on a defensive response to Healy, the article advances a constructive response that would have theological speech take up residence between logics of belief and coming to belief, which the article re-imagines in terms of what Stanley Cavell calls “comedies of remarriage.”

Austen’s Persuasion and the Comedy of Remarriage

The paper reads Jane Austen’s Persuasion in light of Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage , focusing on three main links between Cavell’s analysis of seven Hollywood films and Persuasion : the concept of remarriage itself, the social agenda and the cultural/feminist vision. In addition to applying the Cavellian idea of remarriage as “a reconciliation of a genuine forgiveness” to the renewed romance between Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth, the paper borrows the term “co-creation” from the business world and, associating it with the idea of the “analytic third” in contemporary psychoanalytic theory, defines Anne's and Wentworth's evolving rediscovery of each other as a “knowing again” or a co-creation, assisted by the novel’s temporality, in which the fictional present consists of a mutual evolving relationship intertwined with the events of the past, which must be faced and worked through. In Persuasion , the newly created mutuality between Anne and Wentworth also signals social change in which the old, stagnant aristocratic way of life must give way to the energy of the middle class, here represented by the navy. For Cavell, the comedies of remarriage reflect a hidden agenda of culture in which the previous generation’s feminist gains are worked through in the private sphere. The paper claims that Persuasion , and more specifically its heroine, Anne Elliott, also reflect a phase in the struggle of gender equality in which the radical feminist notions go “underground” and are worked through in the private domain, to serve as building blocks for the public feminist struggle of the late nineteenth century.

Sex and the Single Individual: Kierkegaard and Cavell on Repetition and Remarriage

This essay explores the impact of Kierkegaard’s work on the thought of Stanley Cavell. Cavell identifies two central themes in Kierkegaard’s philosophy: first, rather than concerning itself with problems of logic or with abstract questions, philosophy is concerned with ordinary life and its lived spiritual questions; second, there are things that can only be understood by participating in them. Therefore, the task of the philosopher is not to explain or define ideas but to dramatize for the reader that the choice of one’s inward way of life is of vital importance. These two themes, along with Kierkegaard’s account of repetition, are fundamentally important in Cavell’s own work in the philosophy of film, specifically in what Cavell calls the “comedies of remarriage” and the “melodramas of the unknown woman.”

Conversations: risk, passion and frank speaking in education

This article considers conversations in and about education. To focus the discussion, it uses the scenario of a conversation between a trainee teacher and her mentor reflecting together on a lesson that the trainee has just taught. I begin by outlining the notion of reflective practice as popularised by Donald Schön, and show how, in the scenario, the reflective practice conversation leads to talk characterised by recourse to particular dominant discourses within education, and how this in turn can lead to a certain voicelessness. I then consider what the possibilities for the reflective practice conversation might be, looking first at the Greek notion of parrhēsia and how this has been discussed in the work of Michel Foucault in contrast to other forms of talk such as rhetoric or chattering. I argue that, whilst the parrhēsiastic conversation may allow for the exploration of the relationships (between the mentor and the trainee, each participant and their words and a relationship of care for the self), such possibilities are fraught with difficulty. I then move to consider how such relationships might be developed through recognising the expressive aspects of language emphasised in Stanley Cavell's notion of passionate utterance. I first trace the development of Cavell's thought through John Austin's contrast in language between the constative and the performative. I then illustrate the idea of passionate utterance from the films Cavell describes as the ‘Hollywood comedies of remarriage’, and argue that the passionate utterance opens up opportunities for the kind of conversation in education that is itself educative.

Irony in the age of empire: comic perspectives on democracy and freedom

Acknowledgments Prologue: On Truthiness 1. Laughter against Hubris: A Preemptive Strike 2. Laughing to Keep from Crying: Cornel West, Pragmatism, and Progressive Comedy 3. Authenticity in an Age of Satire: Ellison, Sartre, Bergson, and Spike Lee's Bamboozled 4. Engage the Enemy: Cavell, Comedies of Remarriage, and the Politics of Friendship 5. Three Concepts of Freedom Notes Index

Making Light of the Dark: Understanding the World of His Girl Friday

Making Light of the Dark:Understanding the World of His Girl Friday James Walters (bio) The Meaning of Worlds In the final sentence of a study of performance in Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Andrew Klevan makes claim for a particular achievement of the film's cast, whereby "they embrace [the plot's] linearity to create other dimensions, seamlessly, so that straightforward narratives become worlds" (102). Although focused closely on the special intricacy of the central performances in Hitchcock's film, Klevan's remark holds further value for the broader study of cinema, referencing the extent to which our horizons for speculation about a film's fictional world can often surpass the somewhat narrower concerns of plot development and, crucially, how such conjecture is profoundly influenced by the complex behavior of people in films. The following discussion expands on these two issues, outlining in precise terms some ways in which the actions and attitudes of characters in Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday (1940) function to construct the tone and nature of the fictional world they inhabit and the extent to which an appreciation of this fundamentally shapes our understanding of Hawks's film. The intricate tenor of His Girl Friday's fictional world motivates its selection. Although undeniably comedic (often described as "screwball"), the film harbors elements that evoke a darker mood more usually associated with the melodramatic, resulting in a blend defined succinctly by Robin Wood as a "disturbing complexity of tone" (70). Although the play between Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) and Walter Burns (Cary Grant) in particular is a source of pleasure and amusement, a more oppressive environment exists around the characters, one that becomes entwined with the somewhat lighter story of their prolonged (re)courtship. This fusion originates, of course, from a series of creative choices that Hawks made in adapting His Girl Friday from the stage play The Front Page by Charles McArthur and Ben Hecht, of which a film had already appeared in 1931, directed by Lewis Milestone. Hawks's famous key decision was to change the gender of reporter Hildy Johnson from male to female (Bogdanovich 57). This transforms the story from one in which a controlling editor schemes to keep hold of his ace male reporter to one in which he wishes to claim back his ex-wife "in other capacities than that of a star reporter" (Wood 66). A central ramification of this alteration is that Hawks's film debates gender politics in a way that Milestone's film never attempts, exploring how a female reporter can exist within the ostensibly male world of newspaper reporting, an interest I return to later in my account of the film. Furthermore, the result of Hawks's decision is a narrative pattern focused far more on the dynamics of the relationship between Walter and Hildy, now male and female, involving a brand of effervescent, sparring dialogue for which Hawks had displayed his particular [End Page 90] comedic genius two years earlier with Bringing Up Baby (1938). In generic terms, this crucial shift blurs the film's status from belonging firmly to a cycle that deals with the ruthlessness and moral ambiguity of the press1 to incorporate traits strongly associated with romantic comedy, or more specifically still, the comedy of remarriage, as Stanley Cavell, in Pursuits of Happiness, has termed films of this kind (a concept discussed more fully in a further section of this article). The integration of these generic elements results in the thematic complexity that forms the basis for critical discussion in this article. Within this structure, the film's organization of space and narrative events results in a compound pattern of the comedic and the melodramatic, so that moments of inventive banter and improvised teasing become inextricably bound to darker instances involving desperate outbursts, near-suicide, and wrongfully ordered execution. Dismissing the uneasy integration of these events as merely symptomatic of screwball-comedy logic unhelpfully averts our attention from the precise nature of the film's narrative composition, providing a convenient but unfulfilling account. A more sustained appreciation of these contrasts, I suggest, is useful in understanding the film's playfulness and its oppressiveness and in explaining...

Marriage, Remarriage, and Other Language Games. Emma Gad’s Ægtestand and De unge Drømme and the Comedy of Remarriage

Emma Gad’s pair of plays, Ægtestand (Marriage) and De unge Drømme (Young Dreams), anticipate the film genre Stanley Cavell called “the comedy of remarriage.” They draw on and parody plays by Ibsen, but also present striking parallels to aspects of modernist drama, notably the genre of the chamber play.

Stanley Cavell and Criticizing the University from Within

Stanley Cavell and Criticizing the University from Within Michael Fischer Stanley Cavell has spoken often of his "lifelong quarrel with the profession of philosophy" but he has said less about the university as a whole and its pressures on all academic disciplines, philosophy included. 1 In Cavell's work, "academic" or "professional" philosophy takes shape in an institutional context he has not yet fully analyzed. I want here to extrapolate from Cavell's work a critical, yet sympathetic, response to the university that I think is especially needed today, when the rise of the so-called corporate university is intensifying some of the professional pressures that Cavell resists. Cavell's discomfort with academic philosophy stems in part from what he regards as its narrowness, specifically, its marginalization of Ludwig Wittgenstein and other philosophers, not to mention Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the comedies of remarriage, and other work that Cavell cares about. In his view, the professional marginalization of these writers partly results from their exemplifying what can seem to be a vague moral seriousness, even at times a prophetic urgency, that calls for something akin to conversion rather than issuing in specific conclusions or reforms. According to Cavell, academic philosophy, by contrast, subsumes moral concerns under ethics, a separate field in which the "point of conversation is getting the other to agree to, or to do, something." 2 Although Cavell does not systematically analyze the institutional pressures on academic philosophy, he does drop some hints. As befitting a subject seeking legitimacy in the university, academic philosophy has aligned itself with teachable subjects such as science, as opposed to more elusive pursuits such as painting and creative writing, which [End Page 471] have been less at home in the university and where the necessity of university instruction may be less clear and the line between success and failure harder to draw. 3 What can be taught in academic philosophy is a method of analysis, mastery of which can be certified in students by professors and in professors by journals, promotion and tenure committees, and administrators. Subdividing philosophy into discrete fields such as ethics makes it even more manageable, or less susceptible to sweeping pronouncements that cannot be tested by experts. Finally, the interest in getting "the other to agree to, or to do, something" associates academic philosophy, or at least ethics, with measurable results and maybe even progress. The rise of the so-called corporate university has exacerbated the emphasis on teachable expertise and definable outcomes that I have been describing. Take the largest private university in the United States—the University of Phoenix—as a model that some state and non-profit private universities may be emulating as they struggle to cut costs, meet external expectations, and work with reduced budgets. At the University of Phoenix, the interest in measurable results gets recast as learning outcomes that teachers enable students to reach as efficiently as possible. Specialization narrows these learning outcomes to sharply defined skills, such as writing business memos, which students can master and build on. Finally, the emphasis on method does not simply depersonalize instruction; it reduces the need for instructors. Each instructor is tasked with teaching as many students as possible, sometimes through distance learning, with class size reaching a limit only when the learning outcomes cannot be delivered. Lacking tenure, these instructors can be replaced, like interchangeable parts, when they wear out or their student customers become too dissatisfied with them. At another rapidly growing for-profit university, DeVry, students unhappy with their instructors are assured, in the words of a campus dean, that "weak links" will be "fixed" in a "total quality management" environment. 4 Along similar lines, Lindsay Waters has recently explored how "the corporate makeover of the university" and "the commercialization of higher education" have affected academic publishing. 5 Universities compete in an increasingly cutthroat marketplace and face an escalating insistence on results from state legislatures, federal agencies, accrediting associations, and boards. Capitulating to this "accountability culture" (EP, p. 20), bottom-line driven administrators have stepped up demands for faculty productivity, measured in quantitative terms by numbers of students taught, grants won, and, what most concerns Waters, books and [End...

The Road to Reno:The Awful Truthand the Hollywood comedy of remarriage

The Road to Reno:<i>The Awful Truth</i>and the Hollywood comedy of remarriage

Stanley Cavell et l'expérience du cinéma

Stanley Cavell is one of the very few renowned American thinkers who have shown interest in the cinema. Whether he studies a genre like &#8220;the comedy of remarriage&#8221; (Pursuits of Happiness) or the &#8220;melodrama of the unknown woman&#8221; (Contesting Tears), or whether he ventures on an ontological investigation (The World Viewed), the philosopher addresses issues which are central to the rest of his work&#160;: scepticism, the question of the ordinary, the possibility of thought in America. The originality of Cavell&#8217;s discourse resides in its being rooted in the classical Hollywood cinema which, according to him, constitutes one of America&#8217;s essential contributions to culture.

Cavell and the Comedy of Remarriage

Cavell and the Comedy of Remarriage

Getting To Know You

Roger A. Shiner GETTING TO KNOW YOU IN pursuits OF happiness, Stanley Cavell attempts to establish the existence of a previously unrecognized genre of film — "comedies of remarriage " — which both includes and is defined by such movies as Adam's Rib, Bringing Up Baby, and TL· Philadelphia Story. l By "marriage" and "remarriage " is meant a certain kind of enduring emotional intimacy with which we as adult men and women will be involved, an intimacy which is an integral part of the human form of life and whose relationship to an institutionally supported legal status in our culture is not one of identity. The same is true for the concept of "divorce" in this context. Using some of Cavell's interpretive ideas as a starting point, I shall seek to present the genre of remarriage as a figure for the profoundest relationships of epistemology and metaphysics — the relationship of the knower to the world which is known and the relationship of the individual to die other individuals widi whom society is shared. Specifically, divorce and remarriage as part of human life are to be seen as figures for separation and kinship, avoidance and acknowledgement in the philosophical sense of those terms.2 My discussion proceeds on several levels. There is film criticism, which attempts to find significance in certain movies. There is an examination of values, which presents a certain view ofmarriage as a human relationship. There is some metaphysics, which addresses certain traditional philosophical problems in a nontraditional way. And finally there is metaphilosophy , which attempts to present a different way ofhow to ask, and how to acknowledge as being answered, the great questions of philosophy. Only the latter two projects could be described as "philosophical" in a conventional sense. Yet, as Arthur Danto has rightly remarked,3 Cavell in Pursuits ofHappiness seems to be trying to suggest that to blur deliberately the distinction between criticism and philosophy is to show something 80 Roger A. Shiner81 important about philosophy (and thus criticism as well). If this essay in some small way is thought to show something similar, I shall be pleased. Cavell begins his chapter on It Happened One Night with some ruminations on Locke, Hume, Kant, and the idea of the limitations of human reason. Kant undertakes to show, Cavell claims (PH, pp. 75-76), that our position as human knowers is both better and worse than the Empiricists suggest. It is worse, because even if we pressed human knowledge to its Kantian limits, we would know more but not enough to fulfill the philosopher 's dream. It is better, because the very facts that are limitations of human knowledge are also the necessary conditions ofknowledge as such and to know those conditions clearly is enormously to increase human knowledge. The link between the limitations ofhuman knowledge and the comedies of remarriage is forged by the thought (CR, p. 74) that the capacity to relate oneself to the world by knowledge and the capacity to relate oneselfto others by marriage are both constitutive ofhuman society. Human community is based in part on the fact that there are limitations as to what each of us as individual knowers can know. We need each other's knowledge. If one of us were per impossibile to transcend the limitations of human knowledge, he would know, as it were, what God knows and thus have the power that God has. But the existence of these limitations reveals something deep about human knowledge, something which traditional theory of knowledge rejects, namely that it is human. Human knowledge is limited, but it is genuine. It rests on no surer a foundation than human community, but human beings are a community. We need each other, but we are there for each other. Community, and therefore knowledge, does not need to be achieved: it exists.4 Similarly, the conventions in society limiting the capacity to relate oneselfto others by marriage (one at a time, and only under protest not one forever) reveal something deep about the nature of marriage. The mutuality of the intimacy ofmarriage is possible only in conjunction with the exclusiveness of marriage. Only by turning away from all others can the taking into...

Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage

Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage