Announcing the 2025 Symposium on Cavell and Film

OLP & Literary Studies Online is pleased to announce its 2025 symposium devoted to Stanley Cavell’s philosophy of film. The event will bring together scholars working across ordinary language philosophy, film theory, literary studies, aesthetics and cultural criticism to examine how cinema gives form to questions of scepticism, acknowledgement, intimacy, moral education and the possibility of shared understanding.

Cavell’s writing treats film as a serious philosophical medium rather than as an illustration of pre-existing ideas. His readings of Hollywood comedies, melodrama, Shakespeare, Emerson and Wittgenstein provide a rich starting point for discussion, while his account of viewing invites renewed attention to the social and ethical conditions of spectatorship. The symposium will welcome contributions on classic and contemporary cinema, including work relevant to Australian film culture and regional research communities.

Film As Philosophical Practice

The symposium will explore Cavell’s claim that films can think through their forms, voices and patterns of attention. A film’s framing, editing, performance or use of silence may disclose a problem that cannot be reduced to a proposition. This approach creates productive connections between close reading in literary studies and the analysis of cinematic language.

Possible topics include the relationship between film and ordinary language, the role of genre in philosophical reflection, and the ways cinema stages the desire to be known. Participants may also consider Cavell’s discussions of scepticism: the fear that other minds or the world itself remain inaccessible, and the related ethical demand to acknowledge rather than simply prove another person’s existence.

The programme will make room for a broad range of methods. Papers might address a single film, a director’s body of work, a philosophical text, an adaptation, or a classroom practice that places film and literature into conversation.

Cavell, Wittgenstein And Literary Studies

Cavell’s engagement with Wittgenstein remains central to the symposium’s intellectual focus. Both thinkers attend to the uses of words, the limits of explanation and the human situations in which philosophical confusion arises. For literary scholars, this offers a way to read dialogue, narrative voice and interpretive disagreement without treating meaning as a fixed object detached from practice.

Sessions may examine how Cavell’s ideas bear on tragedy, comedy, autobiography and the Bildungsroman. His concept of moral perfectionism, with its emphasis on aspiration, conversation and self-transformation, also opens paths towards studying characters who must learn to see themselves and others differently.

The event will encourage conversations between established scholars, early career researchers and postgraduate students. Work on Cavell’s published writings can sit alongside emerging research on screen cultures, television, streaming cinema and Indigenous or diasporic forms of storytelling.

Australian Perspectives On Cinema And Acknowledgement

An Australian setting offers distinctive opportunities for thinking about film, place and recognition. Researchers based in Melbourne might connect Cavell’s account of film viewing with the programmes and public conversations associated with ACMI, while colleagues in Sydney may draw on the city’s cinematheque culture, university film societies and long-standing traditions of serious screen discussion.

The symposium will also welcome papers engaging with Australian cinema, from the unsettling landscapes of Picnic at Hanging Rock to the social tensions of Wake in Fright. Such work need not present these films as straightforward examples of Cavell’s philosophy. Instead, it can ask how local histories, colonial inheritances, regional identities and forms of belonging complicate ideas of acknowledgement and shared experience.

Scheduling and participation will take account of Australian academic calendars and Australian Eastern time. A hybrid format would support attendance from researchers across Brisbane, Canberra, Adelaide, Perth and Hobart, as well as colleagues joining from Aotearoa New Zealand, Asia, Europe and North America.

Programme And Participation

The symposium will feature keynote discussions, individual papers and roundtables. The organisers are especially interested in proposals that place Cavell in dialogue with filmmakers, critics and philosophers beyond the familiar canon, including work on documentary, animation, television, popular cinema and contemporary streaming platforms.

Areas Of Interest

• Cavell and Wittgenstein on language, scepticism and ordinary life
• Hollywood comedy, remarriage, melodrama and moral perfectionism
• Film adaptation, literary form and philosophical interpretation
• Australian cinema, Indigenous screen studies and cultural belonging

Contributors may submit proposals for individual papers or collaborative sessions. Submissions should explain the central argument, identify the films or texts under discussion and indicate how the project engages Cavell, ordinary language philosophy or related debates in film and literary studies.

Useful Details For Contributors

• Proposals from postgraduate and early career researchers are warmly encouraged
• Papers may address English-language or international cinema
• Hybrid participation will support scholars unable to travel to the host city
• Final dates, venue information and submission instructions will appear in the symposium notice

The organisers aim to create a generous scholarly environment in which disagreement can remain intellectually productive. In the spirit of Cavell’s writing, the symposium will treat conversation as a mode of inquiry: a practice through which participants test descriptions, revise interpretations and attend more carefully to what films ask of their viewers.

Continuing The Conversation

The symposium will form part of OLP & Literary Studies Online’s wider coverage of ordinary language philosophy and literary studies. Related posts will include bibliographic resources, announcements of relevant books and articles, reviews, conference reports and materials for readers beginning work on Cavell or Wittgenstein.

Updates will be added to the site’s archive as the programme develops. Readers may also wish to follow current research in film philosophy, aesthetics and literary criticism through the website’s curated resources, particularly where these fields meet questions of language, interpretation and ethical attention.

Researchers, teachers and students are invited to follow the announcement, circulate it through Australian departments and reading groups, and prepare proposals for the 2025 programme. Further information will be published by OLP & Literary Studies Online as arrangements are confirmed.