DOCUMENTARY FILMS
Six documentary feature films in
DavidLaRocca [at] Post.Harvard.Edu
BOOKS
13 Metacinema
12 Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind
10 The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema
9 The Bloomsbury Anthology of Transcendental Thought
8 The Philosophy of Documentary Film
7 A Power to Translate the World
5 Emerson’s English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor
3 The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman
Invited Lecture at Le Moyne College
Syracuse, New York
Directed a Colloquium on Emerson and Nietzsche in Big Sky, Montana
Essay
Seeing Metaphors
in
EMERSON FOR THE
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Global Perspectives on
an American Icon
Barry Tharaud, editor
University of Delaware Press (2010)
OTHER WORK
Article
The Limits of Instruction:
Pedagogical Remarks on
Lars von Trier’s
The Five Obstructions
Vol. 13 (2009)
Film and Philosophy
Special Edition:
Teaching Philosophy
Through Film
Essay
Rethinking the First Person
Autobiography, Authorship, and the
Contested Self in Malcolm X
in
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPIKE LEE
Mark T. Conard, editor
The University Press of Kentucky (2011)
DOCUMENTARY FEATURE FILMS
created as Coordinating Producer and Consulting Editor
with Academy Award nominated
Director William Jersey
and
Master Cinematographer Robert Elfstrom
I was chosen by Werner Herzog to participate in his roving educational experiment for the cinematic spirit—Rogue Film School.
RFS is Herzog’s personal, peripatetic, clandestine workshop devoted to the character of one’s soul, the nature of ecstatic truth, the possibility of aesthetic ecstasy, and honestly facing the reality of one’s “inner landscapes.”
Essay
Note to Self:
Learn to Write Autobiographical Remarks
from Wittgenstein
in
WITTGENSTEIN READING
Daniel Steuer, Wolfgang Huemer, and Sascha Bru, eds.
De Gruyter (2013)
Created with ColdWater Media
Article
The False Pretender
Deleuze, Sherman, and
the Status of Simulacra
The Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism
Vol. 69, No. 3 (Summer 2011)
Essay
“A Lead Ball of Justice”
The Logic of Retribution and
the Ethics of Instruction
in True Grit
Article
Still, Standing
Anonymous Desire and Unarticulated Threat in
Julian Hibbard’s The Noir A-Z
AFTERIMAGE
The Journal of Media Arts and
Culture Criticism
Vol. 38, No. 5
March/April 2011
Essay
The Ethics of Contracts,
Conscience, and Courage in
The Insider
in
THE PHILOSOPHY OF MICHAEL MANN
Aeon Skoble, Steven M. Sanders, and
R. Barton Palmer, editors
The University Press of Kentucky (2014)
Afterword
Out of Nowhere
Remarks on Julian Hibbard’s
Existential Graphs
in
SCHEMATICS: A LOVE STORY
Julian Hibbard
Buzz Poole, editor
Mark Batty Publisher, New York
Reviewed on:
Editor of Volume
Estimating Emerson
An Anthology of Criticism
from Carlyle to Cavell
Edited with an Introduction
and Annotations
by
David LaRocca
67 celebrated writers
174 years of criticism
736 pages
Bloomsbury 2013
Article
Not Following Emerson:
Intelligibility and Identity in the Authorship of Literature, Science, and Philosophy
Vol. LIV, No. 2, Winter 2013
James B. M. Schick, editor
Podcast
Everyone’s Autobiography
Remarks on Anxiety and Pseudonymity
in the work of
Soren Kierkegaard and
Charlie Kaufman
The New York Public Library
South Court Auditorium
February 16, 2012
Article
The Education of
Grown-ups
An Aesthetics of Reading Cavell
The Journal of Aesthetic Education
Vol. 47, No. 2 (Summer 2013)
An earlier version of the essay was presented
at the conference “Wittgenstein Reading”
Universiteit Gent (Belgium)
June 25, 2010
Article
Performative
Inferentialism
A Semiotic Ethics
Liminalities
A Journal of Performance Studies
Vol. 9, No. 1 (2013)
Essay
Reading
Cavell
Reading
Stanley Cavell, Literature, and Film:
The Idea of America
ed. Andrew Taylor and Aine Kelly (2012)
Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature
Introduction to Book
Cresting:
A Series of Remarks on
Takashi Homma’s New Waves
New Waves 2000-2013
Photographs by Takashi Homma
September 12 - October 26, 2013
Opening Reception:
Thursday, September 12th, 2013 6-8 pm
The artist will be present
Location:
Longhouse Projects
Hudson Square
285 Spring Street
(between Hudson & Varick)
New York, NY 10013
“This immensely learned, deeply thoughtful and far-ranging book helps re-situate Emerson in his own time, and in ours. More than just a work of scholarship, it rises to the level of philosophical investigation. It is also witty, playful and, in its own strange way, original.”
— Phillip Lopate
editor of Writing New York and The Art of the Personal Essay
Director of the Graduate Program in Nonfiction, and Professor
Columbia University
“In this elegantly written, scrupulously researched book,
David LaRocca has convincingly demonstrated that, rather than locating a restricted area of inquiry, Natural History constitutes the grounding precondition for Emersonian thinking. [. . .]”
— Donald E. Pease
Professor of English and the Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities, Dartmouth College
“David LaRocca treats Emerson's English Traits with the philosophical seriousness and sophistication the book has long deserved, but never before so richly received. [. . .] This is a valuable contribution to the re-assessment of Emerson's most neglected work, and a distinctive example of creative hermeneutical engagement.”
— Neal Dolan
Associate Professor of English, University of Toronto
“In this wonderful book,
David LaRocca illuminates Emerson's mind by, in effect, pursuing his methods. LaRocca's treatment of English Traits is no mere academic summary. [. . .] With a vast range of reference, running from Wittgenstein to Darwin and from Coleridge to Montaigne, and an engagingly 'album'-like structure, the book traces Emersonian connections between topics as remote as the origins of evolutionary theory, the making of commonplace books and the rise of the American anti-slavery movement. It offers a glitteringly many-sided examination of the evolution of Emerson's deeply creative mind in its efforts to arrive at an understanding, not only of England, but also of the nascent American culture that it was in process of helping to form.”
— Bernard Harrison
Emeritus E. E. Ericksen Professor of Philosophy,
University of Utah and
Emeritus Professor of the Humanities, University of Sussex
Bloomsbury 2013
408 pp.
“In this finely crafted and highly original piece of scholarship, LaRocca not only draws attention to one of the most neglected texts in Emerson’s oeuvre, he also presents an extended and insightful meditation on the nature of metaphor and the formation of cultural identity. Like a true florilegium, the collection of remarks continuously surprises—but not with gimmicks, rather with the kind of uncanny observations the method of criticism and arrangement is meant to illuminate. Combining literary sensibility with philosophical acumen, Emerson’s English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor also prompts urgent and serious reflection on the relation between literature, philosophy and natural science more generally. Its publication is, therefore, as timely as Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations, and should be greeted with just as much applause.”
— Mario von der Ruhr
Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Swansea University, Wales, and
Associate Editor of the journal Philosophical Investigations
Essay
Affect without Illusion
The Films of Edward D. Wood, Jr.
After Ed Wood
in
THE PHILOSOPHY OF TIM BURTON
Jennifer L. McMahon, editor
The University Press of Kentucky (2014)
Italian philosopher, novelist, and editor of
I Have a Book in the Head (Ho un Libro in Testa)
The Philosophical Side of American Literature
Il lato filosofico della letteratura americana
November 13, 2013
Read the interview in Italian online
or click to the left for a copy in English
Interviewed by
Silvia Bellia
A Review from Choice:
“With this study, LaRocca emerges as a theorist as well as an important scholar of Emerson in an age when ‘theory’ has become a footnote. His recent edited volume Estimating Emerson (Choice, Nov 2013, 51-1329), which offers cultural/philosophical reflections on Emerson, and his essay "Performative Inferentialism: A Semiotic Ethics" (published in the February 2013 issue of the journal Liminalities) testify to this. The present study stands alone in its treatment of the little-studied English Traits (1856), though LaRocca pays due diligence to the studies that have preceded his. His key concern is how to read Emerson historically (in terms of 19th-century metaphors of natural science) while appreciating him ‘transcendentally’ (as a method of thinking in the 21st). This study performs the Emersonian inheritance of analogy, of seeing the one in the many. In studying English Traits, LaRocca looks at journals, figures, sentences, and paragraphs occurring throughout his essays, and offers reflections on Emerson and the ‘nature’ of metaphor. This study should be read by those who think themselves comfortable with Emerson, and by those who feel abandoned by theory. Mostly, though, this should be read by those who are in interested in figuring the thought that lies beyond reach.”
Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.
— R. T. Prus
Professor and Chair of English, Humanities, and Languages
Southeastern Oklahoma State University
MOST RECENT MONOGRAPH
Editor of Volume
The Philosophy of War Films
. . . now in paperback
“A significant contribution to not only the philosophy of the war film but also to philosophy of film itself.”
“The essays are fresh and surprising.”
“Written by an outstanding array of international scholars.”
“Important and timely.”
“Connecting the reality of war with the art of filmmaking.”
“Rich and deeply thought-out consideration of the representation of war on film.”
“[LaRocca] makes many insightful observations, especially over the relation between the truth of war and the images of
war on screen.”
“This is a serious book. [...] and I highly recommend it.”
Essay
We Were Educated for This?
Paideia, Agonism, and the Liberal Arts
in
GIRLS and PHILOSOPHY:
This Book Isn’t a Metaphor for Anything
Richard Greene and Rachel Robinson-Greene, editors
Open Court (2015)
Editor of Volume
Emerson’s
Transcendental Etudes
30 years of
Stanley Cavell’s essays
on Emerson
Edited with preface, annotations,
a general index, and
a citation index
Stanford University Press 2003
in the series
Cultural Memory in the Present
edited by Hent de Vries and
Mieke Bal
From a review in American Literary History:
“In making a new case for the philosophical sophistication of English Traits, LaRocca has achieved his own Emersonian feat, the creation of a new ‘atmosphere in which to think’.”
— Jacob Risinger
Assistant Professor of English, The Ohio State University
To read the full review in ALH Online Review click below:
From a review in the Journal of American Studies:
“I imagine David LaRocca having fun composing this book—not because it is in any way frivolous or frolicsome (chapter 1 is titled ‘More Prone to Melancholy’) but because it is an engaging experiment in criticism, an attempt to perform literary study in such a way as to bring its subject to life. [. . . A ] florilegium such as Emerson’s, such as LaRocca’s, emits a kind of ‘bouquet,’ and ‘atmosphere in which to think.’ The patient reader, the reader willing to make ‘interpretive shifts,’ a reader capable of ‘loyalty to the present’ and of reinforcing ‘an openness to the complexity of emerging phenomena,’ will find that atmosphere by turns exhilarating, confusing, enticing, and drowsy with the hum of bees. Nevertheless, the reader must grant that removing Emerson’s writing from a museum and placing it in a florilegium does wonders for its constitution.”
— T. S. McMillin
Professor of English, Oberlin College
To read the full review in the Journal of American Studies
click the cover to the right:
Interviewer
Equivalent Simulation
A Conversation with John Opera
AFTERIMAGE
The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism
John Opera is an American photographer who works at the intersection of photographic materiality and light-derived abstraction.
Vol. 42, No. 6 May/June 2015
Director of Documentary Film
Brunello Cucinelli:
A New Philosophy of Clothes
Official Selection of the
New York City
International Film Festival (premiere)
New York City
Independent Film Festival
NewFilmmakers New York
at Anthology Archive
Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival
Click on journal cover to read two articles
on Cucinelli in
The Journal of Religion and Business Ethics Vol. 2 (2015)
2013, 38 min.
“This tactfully edited, helpfully annotated collection of essays makes
available a body of work, developing over thirty years, in which Stanley
Cavell has argued the case for Emerson as a serious philosopher.”
— Stephen Mulhall
Professor of Philosophy, Oxford University
in the Times Literary Supplement
“This is the definitive anthology on America’s premier man of letters — Ralph Waldo Emerson.”
— Cornel West
Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy, Harvard University
The Messenger (2009)
dir. Oren Moverman
June 15
Return (2011)
dir. Liza Johnson
July 20
Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997)
dir. Werner Herzog
August 17
BHS related events include presentations by
Sebastian Junger (Restrepo, The Last Patrol) and
Phil Klay (Redeployment)
15 contributors
538 pages
in Mark Conard’s series
The Philosophy of Popular Culture
University Press of Kentucky
2014, paperback 2018
Coeditor of Volume
A Power to Translate the World:
New Essays on Emerson and
International Culture
with Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso
The impact of global thinkers on Emerson; Emerson’s impact on global thought
“Emerson was always a transnational thinker, and in this respect as in others, we have yet to catch up with him. This fine, wide-ranging volume will be of considerable help. These essays bring one to Emerson from, and allow one to travel out from his texts towards, a variety of geographical, cultural, and disciplinary regions, often in surprising ways.”
— Russell B. Goodman
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
“The essays gathered in this superb collection testify to the centrality of the historical and political to [Emerson’s] thinking. Indeed, Emerson here emerges as a truly international writer who himself thought in a setting that far exceeded the boundaries of the national.”
— Branka Arsic
Professor of English
Columbia University in the City of New York
“[The book] invigorates by means of sudden discoveries, cross-connections, overlaps, gaps, as each of these ‘prismatic’ essays reflects the question afresh.”
— Laura Dassow Walls
William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English
University of Notre Dame
[access the full review by clicking below]
18 contributors
339 pages
in Donald Pease’s series
Remapping the Transnational:
A Dartmouth Series in
America Studies
Dartmouth College Press
University Press of New England
2015
Podcast
Building a Brand with
Bricks and Beliefs
J. P. Kuehlwein interviews David LaRocca
Book Event:
Cornell University
Department of English
Contributors gather to
discuss the volume.
Please join us.
April 29, 2016
Friday, 4:30-7pm
Goldwin Smith Hall
English Lounge
One of Emerson’s “most astute interpreters . . . LaRocca consistently challenges the limits of academic categorization.”
“Rather than argument, the book is a smart, exciting demonstration of Emersonian thinking and a way to approach his work by its affiliations—to other Emerson texts and to texts by others—and ‘to make allusions coalesce.’
Learned, daring, and lively, LaRocca’s book is the most provocative treatment of Emerson this year.”
— Robert D. Habich
Professor of English, Ball State University
Past President of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society
Former Editor of the Emerson Society Papers
from American Literary Scholarship (2013) 3-21
Interviewer
Of Photographing in Ice
A Conversation with Julian Hibbard
AFTERIMAGE
The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism
Julian Hibbard is a British photographer and author who has published The Noir A-Z:
A Modern Abecedary (2009) and Schematics:
A Love Story (2011). LaRocca discusses the earlier projects and picks up with Hibbard in the midst of his latest body of work, Transference.
Vol. 43, No. 6 May/June 2016
LATEST VOLUMES
Editor of Volume
The Philosophy of
Documentary Film:
Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth
. . . now in paperback
Editor of Volume
The Bloomsbury Anthology of
Transcendental Thought:
From Antiquity to the Anthropocene
31 contributors
644 pages
in Mark Conard’s series
The Philosophy of Popular Culture
Rowman & Littlefield
2017
85 iconic philosophers & writers
848 pages
Bloomsbury Academic
2017
“This anthology is a gem! . . .
Get it for yourself and see!”
Bringing together documentary filmmakers, philosophers, and film theorists, this volume will be an important resource for all of those who are interested in this important genre of filmmaking, be they students, professors, scholars, or just serious film viewers.”
— Thomas E. Wartenberg
Mount Holyoke College
“The Philosophy of Documentary Film is a welcomed addition to the scholarly study of a mischievous praxis—one that continues to expand, contract, merge, and mangle in its attempts to explore versions of “real life” on film. Periodic, thoughtful reflection on this rogue form is necessary, and this book provides it. The leading lights of nonfiction film scholarship are well represented, and especially pleasing to me, as a documentary filmmaker, is the fact that documentarians have also been enlisted to write about our craft. Furthermore, just for good measure, The Dogma 95 Manifesto is included as both a beacon and dangerous shoal to filmmakers exploring the choppy waters around the fiction/nonfiction whirlpool. Great idea!”
— Ross McElwee
Director, Sherman’s March, Bright Leaves
Professor of the Practice of Filmmaking, Harvard University
“An impressive selection, including some of the most interesting voices in documentary thought.”
— Jonathan Kahana
University of California, Santa Cruz
“A marvelous collection that promises to inform the teaching of nonfiction film for years to come.”
— J. P. Sniadecki
Director, The Iron Ministry
Northwestern University
“Timely. Vital. Engaging. An essential companion to any thinking about documentary cinema. David LaRocca is especially attuned not just to the voices at the heart of theoretical debates but, to my liking, also to those who push out into the practice and craft of documentary filmmaking.”
— Paul Cronin
School of the Visual Arts
“This is the collection of essays on documentary film that I have been waiting for. It brings together many of the best classic pieces on documentary theory and practice and a thrilling assortment of new essays by philosophers, films scholars devoted to aesthetic issues and close reading, and documentary filmmakers who teach. The writing throughout is of the highest order, and the promise of genuine (as opposed to tinkertoy) philosophical inquiry is amply kept. LaRocca has done an exemplary job of editing, and his lengthy overview essay which serves as the volume’s introduction is incisive and indispensable.”
— George Toles
University of Manitoba
“These works in hand are contemporary perspectives on, for me, the most vibrant practice in contemporary cinema. They call us to think carefully and seriously not only about the truth claims and strategies of specific documentary films but also about why documentaries are so central to our age.”
— Timothy Corrigan
University of Pennsylvania
“With the pervasive and facile use of digital manipulation of images in public and private communications, few questions are more important than the question raised by this richly rewarding book—‘What is real and what is fake?’”
— Bill Jersey
winner of two Peabodys, Emmys, and Oscar nominations
“From considerations of Plato to Cavell and well beyond, these memorable essays fruitfully explore both truth and make-believe in documentary film, as well as the manifold challenges of discerning the elusive differences between them.”
— Lawrence Rhu
University of South Carolina
Podcast
On Cucinelli’s New Philosophy
of Clothes
Marc Vander Maas interviews David LaRocca
for RadioFreeActon
For a list of available titles visit:
David LaRocca Books
Essays:
Errol Morris:
Re-enactment and Reconception
and
Sofia Coppola:
Fame and Self-Reference
American Independent 3
ed. John Berra
Intellect Books (2016)
Article
Teaching Without Explication:
Pedagogical Lessons from Ranciere’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster
in The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Emperor’s Club
in Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies (JOMEC)
Eamonn Dunne, editor
No. 10 (2016)
Essay
The Last Great
Representative
of the Virtues:
MacIntyre after Austen
Jane Austen and Philosophy
ed. Mimi Marinucci (2016)
Great Authors and Philosophy Series
Essay
Hunger in the Heart
of Nature:
Werner Herzog’s Anti-Sentimental Dispatches from the American Wilderness (Reflections on
Grizzly Man)
Dark Nature: Anti-Pastoral Essays in American Literature and Culture
ed. Richard J. Schneider (2016)
Ecocritical Theory and Practice
Essay
Emerson Recomposed:
Nietzsche’s Uses of His American
‘Soul-Brother’
Nietzsche and the Philosophers
ed. Mark T. Conard (2017)
Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Philosophy
in the updated edition of
THE PHILOSOPHY OF
THE COEN BROTHERS
Mark T. Conard, editor
The University Press of Kentucky (2012)
US
Japan
“In this brilliantly edited and introduced anthology, David LaRocca presents us with the broadest selection of authors, philosophers, visionaries, and artists, who have expressed the simple, difficult truths of the transcendental in the most profound and varied of ways.”
— Hent de Vries
Russ Family Professor in the Humanities
and Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University;
Director of The School of Criticism and Theory
Cornell University
“Edited with great erudition and care by David LaRocca, the collection will be an indispensable handbook for anybody researching the heritage of that tradition.”
— Branka Arsic
Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Columbia University in the City of New York
“[This] volume is more than an overview of a field of study—it is participating in the creation of one.”
— Todd May
Class of 1941 Memorial Professor of the Humanities
Clemson University
“LaRocca assumes more the guise of a curator than an editor, and provides us with a veritable Kunstkammer, that is, a cabinet of curiosities, a theater of memory, a world theater of philosophers, artists, and writers from all ages who have addressed the transcendental as a constant and elemental aspect of philosophy and life.”
— Gregg Lambert
Dean’s Professor of Humanities
Syracuse University
“A splendid collection of some of the deepest thoughts of which humans are capable. The book is full of insights and surprises.”
— John Lachs
Centennial Professor of Philosophy
Vanderbilt University
“A timely, provocative conversation seeking further to characterize Emerson’s bearing toward the world beyond the US.”
— Christopher Hanlon
Professor of English
Arizona State University
[access the full review by clicking below]
LaRocca offers a synoptic anthology of essays that brings to our attention how war films can provoke contemplation and meditation because of the ways that such films inevitably focus on the mortality and vulnerability of human beings. The essays, written by an outstanding array of international scholars, work out various ways in which the genre can compel our thinking to become philosophical. This collection of essays constitute a significant contribution to not only the philosophy of the war film, but also to philosophy of film itself.
-- Daniel Flory, Montana State University
This volume offers rich and deeply thought-out consideration of the representation of war on film and of the ways filmic and now digital representation is deeply entangled with how we experience and think about war (up close or at a distance) in actual life. The book reaches back in film history but is especially provocative on war and its representation in the last decade—the situation we are living with now. The essays are fresh and surprising, showing the whole subject of war and film to be far more interesting, complex, and disturbing than in the standard thinking about war genre films that we are used to.
-- Charles Warren, Boston University
War is a pervasive condition, a constitutive part of human experience. The war film genre is extensive and multiform. It is no surprise, then, that war films are provocations to philosophical thought. This important and timely edited collection has an extensive introduction that seeks answers to vital questions: What sort of a phenomenon is a war film? What do we think we mean when we speak of a war film? What are war films for? Can war as such be represented by film? The essays that follow illuminate myriad ethical, aesthetic, epistemological and ontological issues as they related to a broad range of representations of war.
-- Guy Westwell, Queen Mary University of London
The philosophical reflections compiled in this book look at war films from a variety of perspectives. I commend editor David LaRocca for bringing together scholars who each, in different ways, engage the interdisciplinary mission of the inquiry into how war is depicted on screen. What is the philosophy of film, and then, of war films specifically? Do war films harbor a philosophy – of death, violence, love… - or does philosophy enrich the understanding of the cinematic of war? The Philosophy of War Films explores these questions and many more, connecting the reality of war with the art of filmmaking.
-- Mieke Bal, University of Amsterdam
Invited Book Review
Cinematic Ethics:
Exploring Ethical Experience
through Film
Robert Sinnerbrink
Routledge 2015
Vol. 79, No. 1 Winter 2017
Essay
The Ballad of
Boba Fett:
Mercenary Agency and
Amoralism in War
in
The Ultimate Star Wars
and Philosophy:
You Must Unlearn
What You Have Learned
ed. Jason T. Eberl and
Kevin S. Decker
Wiley Blackwell (2016)
Curator and Moderator of Film Series
Three Film Screenings and Discussions
about Cinematic Representations of
Veterans Returning from the War Front
to the Home Front.
Presented during the summer of 2015
at the Brooklyn Historical Society
128 Pierrepont Street, Brooklyn NY 11201
Interviewer
Art-as-Activism and
Public Discourse
A Conversation with Diane Bush
AFTERIMAGE
The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism
Diane Bush is an American photographer and author of Warheads (2006). LaRocca discusses Bush’s long career of using photographic and image-based art for the purposes of political agitation and social critique.
Vol. 44, No. 4
January/February 2017
Essay
Memories.
In the End, Is That
All There Is?
in
Downton Abbey and
Philosophy:
Thinking in that Manor
ed. Adam Barkman and Robert Arp
Open Court (2016)
article published in conjunction with an exhibit and installation
co-curated with Mark Morris in
the Department of Architecture, Art, and Planning at
Cornell University
Article
Legocentrism
in The Senses and Society
Michael Bull and David Howes, editors
Vol. 12, No. 11 (2017)
For this title in the "Re-Mapping the Transnational" series, LaRocca (College at Cortland, SUNY) and Miguel-Alfonso (Univ. of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain) have gathered 17 essays on Ralph Waldo Emerson and his relationship with the literatures across, and between, national boundaries. As a product of the 19th century, Emerson was very much interested in international cultural relationships. This is evident in the essays detailing his interest in Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and India. Yet, as the books in the Dartmouth series propose, the concept of the "transnational" attenuates the role of imperialism and globalism in the critical discussion, cf., essays detailing Emerson's influence on Maurice Maeterlinck, Vicente Huidobro, Rainer Maria Rilke, and others. For the most part, the essays here achieve both perspectives as they uncover the international influence on, and by, Emerson, and establish Emerson's transnational influence on later literature and philosophy. The essays are arranged in four categories: "Emerson beyond Borders in His Time," "Emerson and Global Modernity," "Emerson and the Far East," and "Emerson and the Near East." Although these essays are genealogical and trace influences, they simultaneously call into question origins, intention, and cause and effect. As this collection attests, Emerson is as important in an age of globalization as he was in an age of colonization.
Summing Up: ** Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.
— R. T. Prus for Choice Reviews
Professor of English
Southeastern Oklahoma State University
A Power to Translate the World brings together the expertise of established and emerging Emerson scholars to offer seventeen new readings of both “Emerson’s incorporation of international culture and his effect on international culture” (24). Convinced that Emerson can be understood only with the help of an approach that extends beyond the explanatory framework of the nation, the volume’s contributors challenge and refine recent transnational and global interpretations of the Emersonian canon. [...] Refreshingly skeptical about the heuristic potential of the transnational as an analytical tool, LaRocca and Miguel-Alfonso advance something of a post-transnational argument in resurrecting the “perhaps old-fashioned” category of the “international” (6.) [...] In addition to reviving the international as a category, LaRocca and Miguel-Alfonso also make a plea for the rehabilitation of influence studies, seeking to extend its scope from the study of “direct evidence of reading” to a more conjectural engagement with less obvious forms of intellectual cross-pollination [...]
— Tim Sommer for Emerson Society Papers (vol. 28, no. 1)
University of Heidelberg
Essay
Dueling
Conceptions
of History
in
Hamilton and
Philosophy:
Revolutionary Thinking
ed. Aaron Rabinowitz
and Robert Arp
Open Court (2017)
Essay
“Memory Man”:
The Constitution of
Personal Identity in Memento
The Philosophy of Christopher Nolan
ed. Jason T. Eberl and George A. Dunn
Lexington Books of Rowman & Littlefield (2017)
Article
Translating Carlyle:
Ruminating on the Models of
Metafiction at the Emergence
of an Emersonian Vernacular
in
Special Issue of Religions
Kenneth S. Sacks and
Daniel Koch, editors
(2017), vol. 8., issue 8
Click here for full article
Essay
The European Authorization of American Literature
and Philosophy:
After Cavell, Reading “Bartleby” with Deleuze, then Rancière
Melville Among the Philosophers
ed. Corey McCall & Tom Nurmi (2017) Afterword by Cornel West
Essay
Cults of
Authenticity
in
The Americans and
Philosophy:
Reds in the Bed
ed. Robert Arp and Kevin Guilfoy
Open Court (2018)
Article
Shooting for the Truth:
Amateur Documentary Filmmaking, Affective Optics,
and the Ethical Impulse
in Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities
Dan Geva and Yvonne Kozlovsky-Golan, guest editors
Vol. 36, Nos. 2 & 3 (2017)
from the Afterword by
Cornel West
ed. Corey McCall & Tom Nurmi (2017)
The University Press of Kentucky
2011, 312 pp., hardback
2019, 344 pp., paperback
with new Preface
including
14 newly commissioned essays
Available
with a preview of content at
Editor of Volume
I can’t think of a contemporary filmmaker who is more philosophical, and more deserving of philosophical attention, than Charlie Kaufman. Sometimes—especially when I’m in the middle of one—I think I’d like to spend every minute of every day watching Kaufman’s wildly creative, deliriously destabilizing, and profound and at times beautiful films. Sadly, that is not possible. But reading these essays may well be the next best thing. This frequently fascinating book will help audiences grasp and appreciate the full richness of what is to be found in the work of contemporary cinema’s most madcap metaphysician.
— Troy Jollimore
Professor of Philosophy, California State University, Chico
Guggenheim fellow, author of Love’s Vision, On Loyalty, and Syllabus of Errors: Poems
How gratifying it is to have The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman available in paperback. David LaRocca, the editor of this extraordinary collection, has brought together a distinguished group of contributors from a number of disciplines—political theorists, philosophers, classicists, theologians, professors of literature, filmmakers, and poets. The diversity of background ensures a wide range of stimulating response. Kaufman, whether working as a director or screenwriter, is undeniably an auteur, and one of the book's many achievements is to suggest how decisive and significant the artistic contribution of a screenwriter can be. The questions that propel Kaufman's fictions are overtly and demandingly philosophical, but everything Kaufman does with his existential forays is laced with wit, and extravagant mischief. LaRocca's collection also demonstrates how Kaufman's work is implicitly in dialogue with the ideas of Stanley Cavell. Kaufman's thinking about romantic relationships in terms of repetition and renewal, his preoccupation with the mystery of the film medium's ways of making and unmaking the world, and his beleaguered quest for moral perfectionism all exhibit kinship with Cavell's approach to the beautifully tumultuous human situation.
— George Toles
Distinguished Chair of Film, University of Manitoba
author of Paul Thomas Anderson & A House Made of Light: Essays on the Art of Film
and screenwriting partner of Guy Maddin
“An important volume, full of insights into one of the great philosophical screenwriters of recent times, if not of all time.”
— Joshua Landy
Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French, Professor of Comparative
Literature, and co-director of the Literature and Philosophy Initiative at
Stanford University
author of Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust and
How To Do Things With Fictions
This rich and varied collection of papers helps us to better understand Kaufman’s wonderful films and explore the themes, philosophical and otherwise, that they contain. The section on the not-to-be-missed Synecdoche, New York, is especially rewarding. Read it and you will want to watch the film again and again.
— C. D. C. Reeve
Distinguished Professor of Philosophy
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and
contributor to Christopher Grau’s edited collection on
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Essay
Achilles’ Tears:
Cavell, the Iliad, and
Possibilities for the Human
Stanley Cavell and Aesthetic Understanding
ed. Garry Hagberg
Philosophers in Depth
Palgrave Macmillan (2018)
Essay
Two Wrongs
Make a Right
in
Bad Arguments:
One Hundred of the
Most Important Fallacies
in Western Philosophy
ed. Robert Arp, Steven Barbone,
and Michael Bruce
Wiley Blackwell (2018)
Interviewed by Cris Alvarez on the occasion
of the paperback release (November 2018)
Essay
That’s a Problem
for You, Not Us
in
Wikileaking:
The Ethics of Secrecy
and Exposure
ed. Christian Cotton and
Robert Arp
Open Court (2019)
“In his famous story of Bartleby, we get Melville’s silences at the center of the U.S. capitalist machine—Wall Street. In David LaRocca’s fascinating essay, we see how the French philosophers—Deleuze and Rancière—have delved deep into the bowels of this Melville narrative. LaRocca shows that the profound radical and subversive silences in America’s greatest literary artist have been rendered silent by American philosophers. And just as Nietzsche’s love of Emerson helped authorize and legitimize Emerson for some American philosophers (despite James and Dewey’s magnificent centennial Emerson essays in 1903!), so Deleuze and Rancière may do the same for Melville. Needless to say, Sartre’s love of Faulkner did not do the job in the 1940s. Yet with the creative genius of Stanley Cavell, the Emerson revival in some precincts of philosophy was secured. [...]
LaRocca’s elegant plea for American philosophers to engage Melville’s art—as some do Nietzsche’s Zarathustra—is a cry of the heart and a call for Socratic questing. His acknowledgement “that American Letters (whether as Philosophy or Literature) has daddy issues” echoes Emerson’s “American Scholar,”—a call for cultural independence and intellectual courage. Yet nearly two hundred years later, LaRocca ponders whether we still have anxiety about our origins and get “caught up in schizophrenia, or more simply of madness.” Must we end where we began, that is, end with our near madness to engage and embrace our great literary artist just as we began with Melville’s near madness in a culture of his day hostile to his genius? I think not.
We are on the verge of a major renaissance of philosophic probings of Melville—similar to that of the Emerson revival of thirty years ago.”
MORE BOOKS
Interviewed by Joel Tscherne
on the occasion of the paperback
release (December 2018)
Guest Editor of Journal
Acknowledging
Stanley Cavell
A Commemorative Edition of
Conversations: The Journal of
Cavellian Studies
Open source journal allows for
direct access to content and
pdfs for download
No. 7, Published June 19, 2019
Now available in PAPERBACK
With a New Preface by the Editor
Editor of Volume
The Thought of
Stanley Cavell and Cinema:
Turning Anew to the
Ontology of Film a Half-Century after The World Viewed
14 contributors
313 pages
Bloomsbury Academic
2020
“A brilliant collection of original essays by major figures in the field. The genius of Cavell’s writing is in sharp focus throughout—likewise the continued provocation of The World Viewed and its successor books and essays.”
— Michael Fried
J. R. Herbert Boone Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Art History,
The Johns Hopkins University
“Stanley Cavell argued that film exists in a state of philosophy. Part of what he meant by this was that thinking about a film is a way of doing philosophy. That has been his influential and most controversial claim. The authors in this collection explore what he might have meant in ways more variegated, thoughtful, original, and illuminating than anything I have seen before. The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema, exemplary in its clarity and carefulness, is a watershed both in our understanding of Cavell and of film itself.”
— Robert Pippin
Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor,
The University of Chicago
“[...] LaRocca celebrates the 50th anniversary of the publication of The World Viewed by gathering essays from 14 philosophers, film and literature scholars, and theorists in the US, UK, Australia, France, and the
Netherlands. The contributors all manifest the Cavellian influence. Though not the first collection devoted to Cavell’s cinema
writings nor likely the last, this book will be valuable to those interested in philosophy, film studies, literature, and US culture.”
Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.
—D. W. Rothermel,
Professor Emeritus
California State University, Chico
CHOICE review
Essay
“One of the Most
Phenomenal Debut
Films in the History
of Movies”:
The Sugarland Express as
Expression of Spielberg’s
“Movie Sense” and as
Contribution to a Genre
Cycle
in
A Critical Companion
to Steven Spielberg
ed. Adam Barkman and
Antonio Sanna
Lexington Books (2019)
Essay
SCT: Summer
Camp for
Theorists
in
In Theory: The Newsletter
of the School of Criticism
and Theory
Hent de Vries, ed.
Winter 2017
Book Review
The American Road Trip and American Political Thought
by Susan McWilliams Barndt
The Review of Politics
2019
Book Review
Revolution of the
Ordinary
by Toril Moi
American Book Review
2019
Book Review
The Best Read
Naturalist:
Nature Writings
of Ralph Waldo
Emerson
ed. Michael P. Branch and
Clinton Mohs
Oxford Academic,
American Literary History
2019
Essay
Weimar Cognitive
Theory:
Modernist Narrativity and the
Metaphysics of Frame Stories
(After Caligari and Kracauer)
The Fictional Minds of
Modernism: Narrative Cognition
from Henry James to
Christopher Isherwood
ed. Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso (2020)
Editor of Volume
Inheriting Stanley Cavell:
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
20 contributors
357 pages
Bloomsbury Academic
2020
“Inheriting Stanley Cavell, beautifully edited by David LaRocca, is so much more than a gathering of reminiscences and testimonials. So many of the pieces in the volume prove gripping, and they cumulatively transformed my sense of what Cavell had accomplished. This volume makes a strong case for the revolution that Cavell's extraordinary philosophic sensibility, powerful presence as a teacher, and wide-range of concerns brought about in North American philosophy. For many of the contributors, Cavell not only revived their faith in philosophy, but showed them what it meant to be alive in their feelings and thinking. He demonstrated, not only in The Claim of Reason but in his astonishing exploration of films, Shakespearean tragedies, and Wittgenstein, Emerson, and Thoreau, that the road back to ordinary language criticism was open, and our best hope for restoring value to humanistic study. The collection is also impressive for its decision to include dissenting voices.”
— George Toles, Distinguished Professor of English, Theatre, Film & Media, University of Manitoba
“The welcoming tone rightly identified by the editor as one genius of Stanley Cavell's exacting style has demonstrably been answered by this timely volume--and in just the right blend of reminiscence, reflection, and fresh testing. The intellectual heritage proposed, and so luminously proven, across these pages--convening a lineage of distinguished readers in their role, as always, of interlocutors--honors the balance of intimacy and reach in Cavell's influential philosophical writing: a style of thought inseparable from the searching prose that gave, that gives, it shape.”
— Garrett Stewart, James O. Freedman Professor of Letters, University of Iowa
“In moods ranging from the elegiac to the exuberant to the contentious, the essays collected here remember Cavell and his work, put it to further use, and engage with it critically. Together their authors compose a conversation that amounts to what Cavell once described philosophy as being--an education for grownups--in which accomplished, mature thinkers continually seek their better selves, amidst the plights and possibilities of culture.”
— Richard Eldridge, Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of Philosophy, Swarthmore College
“The voices gathered in this collection, each finding a different balance between the claims of memory, sympathy, and critique, together illuminate the relation between Stanley Cavell's life and his writings, and disclose an unattained but attainable future for philosophy to which we all might be attracted.”
— Stephen Mulhall, Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy, New College, University of Oxford
“David LaRocca has gathered together some of the world's foremost scholars of Stanley Cavell's work for this terrific volume of essays responding to Cavell's philosophy. Collating reprints of groundbreaking essays and original contributions, the book offers wonderful insight into the breadth and depth of Cavell's influence and features a beautifully detailed and lucid introduction by LaRocca that interweaves the various strands of Cavell's philosophy and their legacies. This is without doubt a definitive body of responses to Cavell's work: a must-read for anyone interested in Cavell's work, whatever discipline they are approaching from, and whatever their level of specialism.”
— Catherine Wheatley, Lecturer in Film Studies, King's College London
Article
The Autobiographical Sublime:
Achieving Herzog’s Persona at the
Intersection of the Home Movie, Self-Citation,
and Autofiction
in Estetica: Studi e Ricerche
Francesco Cattaneo and Richard Eldridge,
guest editors
Vol. X (January-June 2020)
15 contributors
341 pages
Bloomsbury Academic
2021
Editor of New Volume
Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind
“This volume pushes Cavellian scholarship forward, showing that the value of Cavell’s work lies not simply in understanding it but in applying it. By extending the philosopher’s methods to an exciting range of international and contemporary films, the chapters compose a timely consideration of what it is to read a film, and to read a film generously.”
— Kyle Stevens, Assistant Professor of Film Studies, Appalachian State University
“Stanley Cavell is, to my mind, the best thinker for helping us account for the power of the film experience, and the fourteen chapters collected here provide ample reason for understanding the importance of Cavell for the study of film. All of the contributors to this wonderful, collective enterprise—brought together by David LaRocca—have in a similar way encountered him and his work. Whether they are revisiting films Cavell loved or taking up the invitation to explore new films, they reveal the importance of Cavell’s writing and method.”
— Sandra Laugier, Professor of Philosophy, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Editor of New Volume
Metacinema:
The Form and Content of
Filmic Reference and Reflexivity
14 contributors
330 pages
Oxford University Press
2021
“We all know meta when we see it, but up until now few have attempted to define it. This terrific book, comprising essays from both established and emerging scholars, is a welcome corrective to that oversight, and a vital addition to contemporary film and media theory."
— Catherine Wheatley,
Reader in Film and Visual Culture, King's College London
OTHER VOLUMES
© 1998-2021 David LaRocca & David Justin Hodge. All rights reserved.
