Secular Mysteries: Stanley Cavell and English Romanticism

1. Stanley Cavell's Redemptive Reading: A Philosophical Labor in Progress 2. Reading Romanticism 3. A Wordsworthian Calling of Thinking 4. Bursting from a Congregated Might of Vapors: Desire, Expression and Motive in Shelley 5. "The Breath Whose Might I Have Invoked in Song": Epipsychidion and Adonais 6. Reviewing the Vision of The Triumph of Life Bibliography Index

Edward T. Duffy is Associate Professor of English (Emeritus) at Marquette University, USA. He is the author of Rousseau in England: The Context for Shelley's Critique of the Enlightenment and The Constitution of Shelley's Poetry.

By reading some central texts of Wordsworth and Shelley, along with those of Cavell, as efforts at the reconstruction or resettlement of the everyday, Edward Duffy recalls to us powerfully why both English Romantic poetry and Cavellian philosophy matter for us as at once 'records of losses' and 'texts of recovery.' Duffy's care, subtlety, power, and insight in this recalling will be of enormous help to anyone trying to make sense of the strange powers of these variously wonderful works that show the philosophical and the literary in engagement with each other. -- Richard Eldridge, Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of Philosophy, Swarthmore College, USA, and co-editor of Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies Edward Duffy's approaches to Cavell's work significantly extend and consolidate Cavell's forays into Romanticism. Just as significant are his companion efforts to understand Cavell's enterprises as in themselves Romantic projects. For Cavell, in Duffy's reading, the skeptic seeks to confront and isolate the ground of knowledge in each individual knower. But skepticism yields a sense of the isolation in human knowledge that is self-imposed and inauthentic. Duffy demonstrates that the skeptic avoids the knowledge that 'we knowers' exist at a point 'where all stand single.' For Cavell's Romanticism, our separateness is not the consequence of a failure of our knowledge but a condition of being an individual. The redemption of solitude from the corrosiveness of a skeptical self-consciousness makes possible an openness to companionship. Through this book's painstaking attention to the details of a poem, we learn of the specific possibilities of poetry as embodying and acknowledging the human voice. Through his careful attention to the steps of Cavell's reflections, Duffy brings us to the territory where philosophy and poetry meet. The effect is stunning. -- Timothy Gould, Professor of Philosophy, Metropolitan State College of Denver, USA, and author of Hearing