ABSTRACT

Stanley Cavell’s In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism defines “serious romanticism’s self-appointed mission” as a “contesting of philosophy, poetry, religion and politics,” where the stakes are both as high and as intimate as possible since they “appear sometimes as the loss or gain of our common human nature, sometimes as the loss or gain of nature itself,” not to mention the further awkwardness that this self-appointed mission is fraught with the “disreputable sense that the fate of this contest is bound up with one’s own writing” (In Quest 43).