Ordinary language philosophy asks what language does in ordinary life rather than treating grammar as a detached system. Austin, Wittgenstein and Cavell direct…
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Ordinary language philosophy and new formalism
Austin and the Unreliable Narrator
J. L. Austin’s account of speech acts offers a way to examine unreliable narration beyond the familiar question of whether the narrator’s beliefs or reports…
A new annotated bibliography of Wittgenstein in literary studies
Wittgenstein’s writing asks us to watch ordinary words in use: a command, a joke, a confession, a fragment of poetry. His remarks on language games, pictures,…
Teaching Cavell's Must We Mean What We Say in a Literary Theory Seminar
For lecturers in Australian humanities departments, Stanley Cavell's Must We Mean What We Say? remains a text that rewards patient, semester-long engagement.…
Levenson on ordinary language philosophy and literary modernism
Michael Levenson's "Ordinary Language Philosophy and Literary Modernism" arrives as a welcomed intervention in scholarship that has long treated these two…
Wittgenstein's Blue Book and the Drift of Meaning in Experimental Fiction
In the autumn of 1933, Ludwig Wittgenstein dictated notes to a small group of Cambridge undergraduates, intending them as a rough bridge between the Tractatus…
Cavell's comic and tragic vision applied to modernist drama
Stanley Cavell's writing on comedy and tragedy unsettles tidy distinctions between the two genres, treating them as two sides of the same linguistic…
Call for Papers: Philosophy and Literature Through Ordinary Language
The study of ordinary language philosophy has long been intertwined with literary interpretation, from the late work of Wittgenstein to Stanley Cavell's…
The Ordinary Language Turn in Translation Studies
Translation studies has increasingly moved away from treating language as a neutral code that can be transferred intact between two systems. Attention now…
Ten Essential Essays on Cavell and Romanticism
Stanley Cavell’s engagement with Romanticism reaches across philosophy, literary criticism, ordinary language, and the American tradition of self-culture. His…