The Awful Truth: On Metonymic Rationality in Hawks and Cavell

Scientific paper - Original scientific paper

• Author: Tatjana Jukić
• Author's institution: University of Zagreb; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences; (Department of English language and literature)
• Scientific / art field, discipline and subdiscipline: HUMANISTIC SCIENCES; Philology; Anglistics

Abstract (english)

When Stanley Cavell analyzes Hollywood comedies of remarriage, he mobilizes their narratives as the platform from which to address America as a political and a philosophical project. This is also where Cavell acknowledges the affinity of the cinematic narrative and psychoanalysis, most notably perhaps in his sustained interest in the Hollywood woman as a spectacle of crisis and critique. With this in mind, I propose to discuss the Cavellian woman, of his cinema books, who dominates the “green world” of the Hollywood remarriage comedy: the bucolic story-space which Cavell associates with the Emersonian vision of America and identifies as definitive to its critical character. I focus however on the comedy in which there seems to be no climactic green world – Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday (1940) – and argue that Hawks’ woman mobilizes metropolitan courtrooms and the adjacent spaces in a similar fashion, as if to suggest that the Emersonian green world is not absent from Hawks’ film but rather metonymic to the positions America would assign to (pure) reason. Finally, I show how this Cavellian complex corresponds to Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical fascination with woman, film and America.

• Keywords (english): Stanley Cavell; Howard Hawks; American cinema; philosophy of film; metonymy
• Language: english
• Publication type: Scientific paper - Original scientific paper
• Publication status: Published
• Peer review: Peer review
• Publication version: Published version
• Journal title: Studia Romanica et Anglica Zagrabiensia
• Numbering: vol. 60, no. -, pp. 99-115
• p-ISSN: 0039-3339
• e-ISSN: 1849-1421
• URN:NBN: urn:nbn:hr:131:146085
• Publication: 2015
• Document URL: https://hrcak.srce.hr/168205
• Type of resource: Text
• Access conditions: Open access
• Created on: 2020-02-13 09:01:28