Alice Munro’s fiction offers a rigorous way to introduce ordinary language philosophy because its narrators rarely deliver unmediated truth. They qualify,…
Stories
Teaching ordinary language philosophy through Alice Munro
Austin’s performatives and the rhetoric of political speech in literature
J. L. Austin’s account in How to Do Things with Words recasts language as action, not mere description. When a minister declares war, promises reform, or…
Cavell, King Lear, and the Ethics of Acknowledgment
Stanley Cavell’s reading of King Lear places acknowledgment at the centre of Shakespearean tragedy. The play is often approached through sovereignty, filial…
Wittgenstein, Aspect-Seeing, And Literary Metaphor
Wittgenstein’s reflections on aspect-seeing offer literary studies a precise way to describe what happens when a familiar expression suddenly becomes vivid,…
Austin’s Doctrine and Contemporary Poetic Practice
J. L. Austin’s doctrine of “so-called performatives” describes utterances that make things happen rather than merely report a prior state. A promise binds, a…
Wittgenstein on certainty and the suspension of disbelief in fiction
Fiction asks us to take words seriously without believing them in the ordinary way. A novel can shape memory, fear, hope and judgement without supplying…
Teaching Cavell and the Avoidance of Love in Drama
Stanley Cavell’s essay “The Avoidance of Love,” collected in In Quest of the Ordinary (1988), bridges philosophical argument and enacted speech. Read alongside…
When the Ordinary Becomes Literature
OLP & Literary Studies Online invites submissions for a special forum on Ordinary Language Philosophy and the Literature of the Everyday. We will examine how…
Austin and the Art of Speech: Literature, Language, Action
Austin and the Art of Speech brings J. L. Austin’s account of utterance into sustained conversation with literary interpretation, rhetoric, narratology and…
Cavell’s Perfectionism And The Bildungsroman
Stanley Cavell’s idea of perfectionism offers a distinctive way to read the Bildungsroman, the genre concerned with education, formation and a person’s…