Criticism and the Risk of the Self

Abstract Stanley Cavell’s modernist practice of philosophizing begins from initiating experiences of blankness, perplexity, disappointment, and obscure elation. His writing about these experiences seeks (greater) animation and interest in life by working through them: finding words for them in order to give them shape and stability through the articulation and development of their content. In this way he seeks to achieve composure in a sense of powers of meaning-making exercised well and of human identity achieved temporally. Elizabeth Bishop’s major poetry, especially her “Arrival at Santos,” is similarly motivated, and it proceeds along similar paths. It thus makes manifest the nature and value of philosophico-poetic work as it is achievable and achieved within time and history.