Rethinking Modernism in Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed

The chapter reexamines the role of modernism in Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed. Beginning from Cavell’s early reflections, it reconstructs how cinema’s automatisms, mythological structure, and demand for acknowledgment mirror the modernist experience of displacement and estrangement. The discussion then situates these claims within Cavell’s broader philosophical trajectory, tracing the gradual absorption of modernism into romanticism and Emersonian moral perfectionism. A central strand of the chapter develops the literary dimension of this problematic, placing Wittgenstein in dialogue with modernist writers such as Nabokov and Gombrowicz. Through this comparison, the chapter clarifies the distinctiveness of modernism and its relation to world-creation, finitude, and the pathos of the modern subject.