The symposium on ordinary language and literary voice brought together philosophers, literary scholars, writers and postgraduate researchers to examine how…
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Symposium Recap: Ordinary Language and Literary Voice
Austin’s How to Do Things with Words and Performative Literature
J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words offers literary studies a precise vocabulary for understanding language as action. An utterance can describe a state…
Wittgenstein And The Poetics Of Doubt
Wittgenstein’s philosophy offers literary studies a distinctive account of uncertainty. Doubt is not simply a private hesitation or a failure to reach…
Cavell, Thoreau, and the Ethics of Literary Nonfiction
Cavell’s debt to Thoreau is best understood as a philosophical and literary inheritance rather than a simple influence. Thoreau gave Cavell a model for writing…
Ordinary language aesthetics under review: a reply to its critics
Recent critiques of ordinary language aesthetics have gathered force. Some accuse the tradition of quietism — of failing to deliver the normative verdicts…
How Ordinary Language Philosophy Illuminates Dialogue in Drama
Drama gives philosophy a visible, audible form. Characters do not simply express private ideas; they ask, promise, accuse, evade, apologise and revise their…
Poker Variance And Skill In Gambling Analysis
The relationship between skill, chance, and uncertainty has long attracted attention in philosophy, literature, economics, and cultural studies. Poker provides…
CFP: Cavell, Wittgenstein, and the Ethics of Reading
Ordinary language philosophy has long invited literary scholars to treat reading as an ethical practice rather than a technical one. A new call for papers…
Teaching Sense and Sensibilia in a literature and philosophy course
When J. L. Austin delivered the lectures that became "Sense and Sensibilia" in 1947, he could not have anticipated how often the text would be taught to…
The Place of Ordinary Language Philosophy in Contemporary Ecocriticism
Ecocriticism has expanded from the study of representations of nature to a broad inquiry into climate, extraction, extinction, environmental justice and the…