From Shakespeare’s Birthplace to Thoreau’s Cabin

Exploring Collections, Museums, and Literature with Stanley Cavell

Abstract

Most of the writings collected in Here and There will be encountered by most of its readers for the first time. Though the vast majority of them have seen the light of day before, they were, as Cavell saw it, “worth rescuing either from oblivion or from the evanescence or specialization of their original locations of publication.” One obvious exception to this rule is the chapter that forms the main focus of this paper: “The World as Things: Collecting Thoughts on Collecting.” This appeared, in a slightly different version and without its subtitle, as the final chapter of Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (2005), where it was in turn anthologized as a somewhat expanded version of an essay Cavell originally wrote for an exhibition catalogue some years previously, in 1998.