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Ordinary Language Philosophy & Literary Studies Online

Annotated Bibliography of Ordinary Language Approaches to Poetry

Ordinary language philosophy offers literary scholars a way to study poems through use, context, voice, attention and shared forms of life. Rather than treating meaning as a detachable code, this tradition asks how words work in situated practices: in promises, descriptions, recollections, arguments, jokes, silences and acts of address.

For poetry, that emphasis opens a productive space between philosophical analysis and close reading. A poem may depend on the difference between saying and implying, the force of a repeated phrase, or the social conditions that make an image intelligible. The bibliography below brings together foundational philosophy, literary criticism and resources useful to researchers working in Australia and beyond.

Defining The Field

An ordinary language approach does not mean studying only informal speech or replacing interpretation with dictionary definitions. It attends to the many things language does in human life, including the ways poetic language stretches, repeats, withholds and reimagines ordinary usage. The relevant evidence may be a word’s grammar, a speaker’s situation, a convention of address or a reader’s sense that something has gone wrong.

The method also resists a simple opposition between everyday language and literary language. Poems can make ordinary expressions newly audible, as when a familiar phrase acquires emotional force through rhythm or placement. In Australian poetry, terms such as “mate”, “country” or “reckon” carry histories of class, region, Indigenous sovereignty and national self-description that cannot be captured by a synonym alone.

Foundational Philosophical Texts

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is an essential starting point. Its discussions of language-games, family resemblance, rule-following, aspect-seeing and private experience provide tools for describing how poetic meaning depends on practice. The book is not a theory of poetry, but its methods encourage readers to look closely at what an utterance enables people to do.

J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words helps clarify the force of poetic address. His account of locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts can illuminate vows, commands, elegies and public declarations. Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind is also useful for its critique of category mistakes, especially when criticism treats metaphorical descriptions of consciousness as literal psychological reports.

These works should be annotated as philosophical resources rather than mined for ready-made literary formulas. Their value lies in redirecting attention towards criteria, circumstances and intelligibility.

Cavell, Skepticism And Literary Voice

Stanley Cavell’s The Claim of Reason connects ordinary language philosophy with questions of scepticism, acknowledgement and the difficulty of knowing another person. Its treatment of criteria is particularly valuable for poetry: a poem may show recognition through tone, gesture or responsiveness without offering proof in a conventional sense.

Cavell’s Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare extends these concerns into literary interpretation, while In Quest of the Ordinary links philosophical reflection with Emerson, Thoreau and the possibility of finding significance in common life. His writing is often dense, but its central lesson is clear: reading involves accepting responsibility for what one can and cannot say about another voice.

Toril Moi’s Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies After Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell provides a strong secondary source. It explains how ordinary language philosophy can renew literary studies without reducing poems to examples of philosophical concepts. For researchers, Moi is especially helpful on interpretation, voice and the ethical stakes of critical description.

Wittgenstein, Poetics And Literary Criticism

John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer’s edited collection The Literary Wittgenstein gathers essays on the relation between Wittgenstein’s philosophical writing and literary form. It is valuable for readers interested in aphorism, fragmentation, cadence and the boundary between argument and performance. The collection also models a careful practice: it compares philosophical and literary passages without claiming that they belong to the same genre.

Marjorie Perloff’s Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary is particularly relevant to modernist and contemporary poetry. Perloff considers how apparently plain language can become strange through arrangement, quotation and repetition. Her work can support readings of poets who unsettle the distinction between statement and composition.

A useful annotation should identify the limits of each source. Wittgenstein’s remarks do not supply a universal poetics, and literary scholars should avoid treating “language-game” as a decorative label. The strongest readings show precisely what a poem makes possible within a particular practice of reading, speaking or remembering.

Research Aids For Students And Scholars

For an Australian project, bibliographic work benefits from combining international philosophy with local literary records. AustLit can help trace Australian poets, journals and criticism, while Trove may locate historical reviews, newspapers and public discussions. University collections in Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal Country/Sydney and Canberra also hold poetry archives that can test claims about literary communities and readership.

Two practical clusters are especially useful when building a reading list.

Primary philosophical sources

Literary and critical companions

Australian researchers should also account for the way the local publishing market is organised. Poetry often circulates through small presses, university journals, festivals and reading series rather than through large commercial houses. A bibliography that includes a Melbourne chapbook, a Sydney lecture or a regional journal can therefore reveal forms of literary exchange that major databases overlook.

Building An Annotated Reading Practice

Each annotation should explain an item’s argument, method and relevance to poetry in three or four sentences. It should distinguish whether a source offers philosophical concepts, a model of close reading, historical context or a critique of ordinary language approaches. Keywords might include poetic voice, speech acts, metaphor, criteria, acknowledgement, form of life, linguistic practice and literary modernism.

Genre is another important category. A lyric, dramatic monologue, public poem and experimental sequence do different kinds of work, so the same philosophical vocabulary will not operate identically across them. A report on genre theory discussions can help situate this question within broader debates about how literary forms organise meaning.

When writing about Australian poetry, specify the social setting rather than treating “ordinary language” as culturally neutral. Consider whether a poem draws on Australian English, Aboriginal English, bureaucratic language, migrant speech or regional idiom, and identify whose ordinary is being represented. That precision keeps philosophical interpretation connected to literary history and lived language.

Use this bibliography as a working research tool: verify editions, add peer-reviewed articles and record how each source changes your reading of a particular poem. Share substantial additions through scholarly networks, reading groups and the OLP & Literary Studies Online archive so that the field remains open, local and continually revisable.