Original scientific paper
The Awful Truth: On Metonymic Rationality in Hawks and Cavell
Tatjana Jukić
Abstract
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
Stanley Cavell; Howard Hawks; American cinema; philosophy of film; metonymy
Hrčak ID:
168205
URI
Publication date:
13.6.2016.
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