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Ordinary Language Philosophy & Literary Studies Online

A curated bibliography of ordinary language philosophy and narrative theory

Scholars working at the seam between linguistic analysis and literary interpretation have produced an embarrassment of riches over the past seventy years. Yet navigating that literature can feel like wandering through a vast secondhand bookshop in Carlton, where the shelves stretch from Wittgenstein's Blue and Brown Books through Cavell's essays on Shakespeare and on into work on conversational storytelling. The bibliography offered here gathers foundational texts, contemporary monographs, and digital resources that map the entanglement of ordinary language philosophy with narrative studies.

It is aimed at honours students preparing dissertations in Hobart or Adelaide, at postgraduate researchers drafting conference papers, and at established scholars wanting to update their reading lists. Sources have been chosen for intellectual influence and for their availability in Australian university libraries.

Foundational texts in ordinary language philosophy

The obvious starting points remain J. L. Austin's Performative Utterances and How to Do Things with Words, alongside Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind and P. F. Strawson's Individuals. These works established the method of attending to what we actually say when we mean what we say. For readers based locally, the recent Oxford reissues of Ryle remain the cheapest entry points, and both Ryle and Strawson are held at the University of Melbourne and University of Sydney libraries in their open-access reserves.

Paul Grice's Studies in the Way of Words belongs on every reading list, since his account of conversational maxims has shaped decades of literary criticism. The 1989 Harvard reprint is the standard citation, though many Australian postgraduate seminars still rely on photocopied extracts. A useful companion is the Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, which includes chapters on rule-following and on the private language argument that bear on fictional narration.

Speech acts and conversational narrative

Monika Fludernik's Towards a "Natural" Narratology reframed narrative theory through the lens of conversational practice, drawing on Austin and Searle to argue that narratives are fundamentally rooted in everyday language use. Her later An Introduction to Narratology remains the clearest textbook synthesis and is widely adopted in Australian literary studies programs.

Mary Louise Pratt's "Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse" remains a touchstone. More recent work by Marina Lambrou and Patty Smart has extended the speech-act approach to digital storytelling. For readers at La Trobe or Macquarie working on rhetoric and composition, Pratt's essay is essential reading. The Australasian Journal of Philosophy occasionally publishes pieces touching on the speech-act dimensions of narrative, and scholars should monitor those issues for relevant interventions.

Stanley Cavell and the literary turn

No bibliography in this area can omit Stanley Cavell. Must We Mean What We Say? collects his earliest essays, while The Claim of Reason develops his Wittgensteinian reading of scepticism. For the literary scholar, Disowning Knowledge and Contesting Tears are perhaps the most directly relevant, exploring what Cavell called the "everydayness" of philosophical language and its proximity to literature.

Australian readers are fortunate that the Cambridge edition of Cavell's Little Did I Know excerpts are held at the State Library of Victoria and at the Fisher Library in Sydney. Cavell's influence has shaped a generation of literary critics working in Melbourne and Sydney, and his name comes up regularly at symposia hosted by the Australasian Wittgenstein societies. For an accessible entry point, the interview collected in Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow is hard to beat.

Wittgensteinian approaches to literary interpretation

Wittgenstein's influence on narrative theory is visible in the work of Rupert Read and Peter Bilton, whose essays treat literary texts as instances of language-games. Their writings appear in collections such as The New Wittgenstein and Wittgenstein and the Moral Life. The essays collected in Ethics and the Literary Imagination by Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack apply Wittgensteinian methods to specific novels, and provide useful models for thesis writers.

For Australian readers, the work of Michael Edwards at the University of Sydney offers an entry into Wittgensteinian philosophy of literature that engages local debates about meaning and interpretation. Edwards's essays in Philosophy and Literature and the Australasian Journal of Philosophy should be standard reading for honours candidates.

Linguistic attention to fiction and narrative voice

Curiosity about how fictional characters speak has shaped a distinct strand of criticism. The essays in David Lodge's The Language of Fiction are still cited frequently, while the more recent Fictional Worlds collection edited by Thomas Pavel offers a wider survey of voice, perspective, and the philosophical dimensions of storytelling. Lodge's volume is held at most Australian university libraries and serves as a reliable starting point.

Closer to the Australian context, scholarship associated with the University of Queensland and the University of Western Australia has focused on Indigenous narrative voice and on the rhetorical texture of settler-colonial storytelling. Honours theses in this area frequently engage with these essays, and supervisors tend to point students toward the special issues of Australian Literary Studies that have appeared in recent years.

Australian contributions and scholarly contexts

Australian philosophers and literary scholars have shaped this field in distinctive ways. The journal Philosophy and Literature, co-edited for a time by scholars affiliated with Australian universities, has published key essays linking Wittgenstein and narrative. Local conferences, including the biennial meetings of the Australasian Association of Philosophy held at the University of Adelaide, regularly feature panels on ordinary language philosophy and aesthetics.

The Wheeler Centre in Melbourne has hosted public lectures bridging literature and philosophy, and podcast recordings of these events are openly available. Australian Book Review and the Sydney Review of Books have carried essays introducing readers to Cavell and to the Wittgensteinian literary tradition, often in language pitched at a broad educated readership. The casual, plainspoken register typical of Australian scholarly writing lends itself well to the ordinary language tradition, and many readers find the philosophical tradition easier to grasp when introduced by Australian writers.

Digital archives and recent monographs

The last decade has seen a flowering of edited volumes. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature offers an indispensable reference, while Wittgenstein, Literary Form, and the Aesthetics of Inquiry collects essays applying Wittgensteinian methods to specific genres. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature is another valuable resource, and all three are stocked by the major Australian university libraries.

Several online resources supplement the printed bibliography. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy maintains reliable entries on ordinary language philosophy, speech acts, and narrative theory, while the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen provide primary source material. Postgraduate students should consult the ARC-funded research outputs available through the Australian Research Council's open-access portal, which indexes theses and articles from Australian universities. The OLP & Literary Studies Online site maintains an updated bibliography that complements the printed volumes.

Recommended starting collection

Readers who take these volumes off the shelf should find themselves well equipped to engage with current debates. Whether you are drafting a thesis in Perth, presenting at a symposium in Brisbane, or simply exploring how everyday language shapes the stories we tell, the bibliography above offers a solid basis for further inquiry. Subscribe to the site for ongoing updates, contribute your own reading recommendations in the comments, and visit the archives for additional reading lists tailored to specific authors and movements.