Little Did I Know ─ Excerpts from Memory

This autobiography in the form of a philosophical diary narrates the events of a life that have produced the distinctive kind of writing associated with Stanley Cavell's name. Cavell reflects on his journey from early childhood in Atlanta, through his musical studies at UC Berkeley and Julliard, to his subsequent veering off into philosophy at UCLA, his Ph.D. studies at Harvard, and his half century of teaching. While Cavell's academic work has often incorporated autobiographical elements, Little Did I Know speaks to the American experience in general. It has much to say about the particularities of growing up in an immigrant family and offers glimpses of lesser known aspects of university life in the second half of the twentieth century. At the same time, Cavell's interests and career have brought him into contact with a range of influential and unusual people. A number of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances figure prominently or in passing over the course of this book, occasioning engaging portraits. J.L. Austin, Ernest Bloch, Roger Sessions, Thomas Kuhn, Judith Shklar, John Rawls, Bernard Williams, Jean Renoir, W. V. O. Quine, Vicki Hearne, and Jacques Derrida are no longer with us; but Cavell also pays homage to the living: Michael Fried, John Harbison, Jay Cantor, Marc Shell, John Hollander, Hilary Putnam, Toril Moi, Jill Clayburgh, Arnaud Desplechin, and Terrence Malick. In keeping with Cavell's philosophical style, the drift of the narrative registers the decisiveness of the relatively unknown and the purely accidental as well. Cavell has produced a trail of some eighteen published books that range from treatments of individual writers (Wittgenstein, Austin, Emerson, Thoreau, Heidegger, Shakespeare and Beckett) to studies in aesthetics, epistemology, moral and political philosophy, cinema, opera, and religion. Here he accounts for the discovery and scope of his intellectual passions and shares them with his readers.