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Ordinary Language Philosophy & Literary Studies Online

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 of affairs, yet it can also promise, accuse, apologise, authorise, name, warn, or alter a relationship. Austin’s account of speech acts therefore provides a productive model for reading novels, poems, plays, memoirs, and hybrid forms in which words create consequences rather than merely represent events.

The value of this approach lies in its attention to context. A sentence becomes a particular kind of act because of who says it, to whom, under what circumstances, and with what recognised authority. For Australian readers, these questions can illuminate parliamentary rhetoric in Canberra, Welcome to Country protocols, courtroom language, public apologies, and the everyday speech acts exchanged at a Melbourne café or on a Sydney train.

From Statements to Speech Acts

Austin begins by challenging the assumption that language primarily conveys information. Some utterances are performative: saying the words constitutes an action. “I apologise” can perform an apology, “I promise” can make a commitment, and “I name this ship” can create a public designation when spoken in an appropriate ceremony.

Literature frequently places such utterances under pressure. A character may promise without intending to keep the promise, declare love in a theatrical setting, or offer an apology that seeks forgiveness without accepting responsibility. Close reading can therefore ask what action a line attempts to perform, rather than treating it only as dialogue or description.

This distinction also helps readers examine narration. A first-person narrator may claim to confess, testify, remember, or explain, but the narrative act may produce suspicion, intimacy, authority, or self-protection. The literary text becomes a field of competing speech acts, each seeking recognition from an implied listener or reader.

Felicity Conditions and Literary Context

Austin’s felicity conditions describe the circumstances required for a performative act to succeed. A bet requires an accepted procedure, suitable participants, and a genuine commitment to the outcome. An official declaration depends on institutional authority. A promise normally requires that the speaker be understood as undertaking an obligation.

Literary works often expose failures in these conditions. A character may pronounce a marriage without legal recognition, issue an order without power, or make a promise in a context where nobody believes the speaker. Such failures are not merely technical defects. They can generate comedy, tragedy, political critique, or a crisis of identity.

The method is especially useful for reading genres built around formal language. In a courtroom novel, the wording of evidence may collide with the rules governing admissibility. In a play, a royal command may become hollow when the speaker’s authority has collapsed. In Australian writing, references to land, belonging, and jurisdiction may also require attention to cultural authority and First Nations protocols rather than being treated as decorative language.

Literary Form as Performative Practice

A poem does more than contain statements about grief, desire, or place. Its rhythm, repetition, address, and silences may enact mourning, insistence, seduction, refusal, or appeal. A refrain can behave like a repeated vow, while a disrupted syntax can perform uncertainty more forcefully than an explicit claim about doubt.

Drama makes the performative dimension especially visible because speech operates alongside gesture, costume, setting, and audience response. A declaration on stage may succeed within the fictional world while failing as a social act, or it may produce consequences that exceed the character’s intentions. Theatricality thus reveals how every speech act depends on conventions that can be followed, bent, or rejected.

Narrative fiction extends this problem through literary address. A novel may simulate a letter, deposition, diary, testimony, or public statement. Each form carries expectations about sincerity and accountability. Readers can ask whether the text invites belief, stages disbelief, or deliberately withholds the conditions under which its words could count as an act.

Ordinary Language and Australian Reading Practices

Austin’s method belongs to ordinary language philosophy because it attends to how words function in actual practices. This does not reduce literary interpretation to everyday conversation. Instead, it encourages readers to compare a text’s language with the social rules and expectations that make particular utterances intelligible.

Australian contexts offer rich material for this comparison. A Welcome to Country is conducted by Traditional Owners or Custodians, while an Acknowledgement of Country can be offered by others; the distinction concerns authority, procedure, and relation, not simply wording. Similarly, public apologies connected with the Stolen Generations carry historical and institutional force that cannot be captured by analysing their sentences in isolation.

Legal language provides another useful setting. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 shapes how literary works may be reproduced and circulated, while courtroom speech operates through formal rules about evidence, testimony, and authority. A literary text that imitates legal language may borrow its force while exposing who is excluded from the institutions that make such language effective.

A Practical Method for Close Reading

A performative reading should begin with the utterance itself and then widen towards its setting. Identify the verb or action implied by the words: promising, naming, accusing, blessing, refusing, confessing, or granting permission. Next, consider the participants, the audience, the relevant convention, and the material consequences of the speech.

Australian students might test this method in a tutorial at the University of Melbourne, a seminar in Sydney, or an online reading group connecting scholars in Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide. The approach works equally well with a canonical play, a contemporary First Nations novel, a spoken-word performance, or a literary review. It attends to institutional settings while preserving the texture of style and form.

Questions for Identifying the Act

A second stage examines infelicity. Is the speaker insincere, mistaken, misheard, coerced, or acting outside the accepted procedure? Does the text invite the reader to repair the failed act, reject it, or recognise failure as its central subject?

Signs of Performative Tension

This approach can be placed in dialogue with Stanley Cavell’s work on acknowledgment, Wittgenstein’s attention to language-games, and contemporary theories of performativity. Austin supplies the initial analytic discipline: ask what words are doing, what conditions support their force, and how literary form makes those conditions visible.

Use these questions to annotate a passage, develop a seminar paper, or contribute a review to a scholarly discussion of ordinary language and literature. Explore the site’s bibliographies and resources on Austin, Cavell, Wittgenstein, and performative language to extend the reading from a single text into a wider field of literary study.