Ordinary language philosophy examines how words gain meaning in use, especially through familiar acts such as promising, naming, warning and describing.…
Stories
A Timeline of Ordinary Language Philosophy and Literature
Cavell and the ordinary in contemporary poetry
OLP & Literary Studies Online is announcing an online symposium on Cavell, ordinary language and poetry. The event will bring philosophical argument into…
Wittgenstein’s aesthetics and the practice of literary criticism
Ordinary language philosophy is often presented as an analysis of vocabulary, but its deepest questions concern how words meet lives. Wittgenstein’s Remarks on…
Austin and the Pragmatics of Literary Quotation
A literary quotation is never merely a detachable piece of language. When a critic cites a sentence, a speaker repeats a phrase, or a novelist places borrowed…
Cavell’s Shakespeare: A Student Study Guide
Stanley Cavell’s Shakespeare criticism brings literary interpretation into close contact with ordinary language philosophy. His readings ask what characters…
CFP: Ordinary Language Philosophy And The Short Story
A new call for papers invites scholars to examine how ordinary language philosophy can illuminate the short story. The proposed conversation brings literary…
How Ordinary Language Philosophy Rethinks Authorial Intention
Authorial intention has long occupied an unstable position in literary studies. Some readers treat it as the final authority on a text’s meaning, while others…
Wittgenstein, Imponderable Evidence, And Literary Judgment
Literary judgment often depends on features that are difficult to isolate and impossible to measure by a single rule. A reader may recognise irony in a…
Reading Cavell’s The World Viewed Through Film Studies
Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed remains an unusual film book: philosophically ambitious, attentive to ordinary experience, and resistant to the idea that…
Call for papers: Cavell, Austin, and the politics of the ordinary
OLP & Literary Studies Online is seeking contributions for a special scholarly conversation on Stanley Cavell, J. L. Austin, and the politics of the ordinary.…