Call for papers: Cavell, Austin, and the politics of the ordinary
OLP & Literary Studies Online is seeking contributions for a special scholarly conversation on Stanley Cavell, J. L. Austin, and the politics of the ordinary. We welcome papers, short essays, and review or bibliography proposals that bring ordinary language philosophy into contact with literary interpretation, critical theory, and public culture. The aim is to examine how familiar words and speech practices carry authority, establish communities, and distribute the right to speak.
This call is especially attentive to the relation between speech act theory and literary form, and to Cavell’s accounts of acknowledgment, skepticism, and shared criteria. It asks how acts of saying, promising, naming, judging, and narrating become meaningful within institutions, and what political stakes appear when a group contests the conventions that make an utterance intelligible. Proposals may be philosophical, textual, comparative, pedagogical, or historically informed.
Ordinary language and public life
Although Austin later unsettles the neat division between constative and performative utterances in How to Do Things with Words, his account of felicity conditions locates ordinary language inside social practices. A promise needs a conventional procedure, an appropriate setting, and a response from those addressed. A wedding vow, a direction in a classroom, or a declaration at a council meeting therefore reveals how authority is organised and how misconduct can be named.
The political question is not simply whether language describes a world. It is who can issue a credible instruction, whose words count as evidence, who receives recognition, and what happens when a speaker breaks or revises a rule. Cavell’s reading of ordinary language brings these questions into focus through acknowledgment and the search for shared criteria. Literary texts can make hidden conditions of public speech visible through irony, ambiguity, silence, repetition, and changes of address.
Cavell and Austin in literary focus
Cavell treats language as a medium of social relation rather than a transparent instrument. His reflections on skepticism and criteria in Must We Mean What We Say? ask how subjects can be uncertain about the standards by which they judge themselves and others, while still making consequential claims. Austin’s attention to use, convention, and the serious effects of utterance provides a productive companion for this project. Together they invite analysis of how literary form organises expectation and responsibility.
Possible work might examine the sentence that performs a verdict, the narrator who claims authority, or the character whose idiom exposes the limits of a community’s shared language. It might connect Cavell’s reading of Austin with Wittgenstein’s language games and forms of life, or ask how colonial, migrant, working, and diasporic speech scenes alter the idea of a common criterion. The point is to preserve textual specificity while allowing philosophical concepts to be tested against narrative situations.
Lines of inquiry for contributors
Contributors may approach the relationship between illocutionary force and representation: how does a novel stage a promise, confession, refusal, or accusation, and how do readers assess its felicity? Another route is the politics of listening. Whose account is treated as adequate, whose silence is interpreted as consent or evasion, and how do narrative form and ordinary idiom distribute credibility? Questions of translation, pedagogy, law, media, and protest can extend the inquiry beyond literary texts.
Papers could also investigate Cavell’s concepts of acknowledgment, projection, contract, and the seriousness of language alongside Austin’s paradoxes and everyday performances. Comparative studies of Australian and international writing are welcome, as are essays that engage the site’s resources on Cavell and Wittgenstein. A strong proposal will identify a precise textual or philosophical problem and show how the cross-disciplinary exchange changes its interpretation.
Australian contexts for an ordinary politics
Local context can sharpen this call without becoming an exercise in regional colour. Canberra’s parliamentary and bureaucratic settings show how definitions, official categories, and procedural language shape citizenship. Melbourne’s literary culture and public institutions around Sydney Harbour, together with ordinary exchanges in suburban and regional communities, ask how the same words travel across private, civic, and cultural spaces. A phrase that sounds routine in one setting may carry a different burden in another.
Researchers may also attend to patterns in Australian conversation: first-name familiarity, understatement, egalitarian address, and expressions such as “no worries” or “not a huge deal” can soften a request or redirect disagreement. In pubs, schoolrooms, council chambers, football clubs, and communities across the city and the bush, these habits help make social membership visible, yet they can also conceal unequal power. Australian scholarly publishing works through a mixed ecosystem of university presses, subscription journals, repository-based access, and Australian Research Council funding cycles; these mechanisms influence which projects are supported and how findings reach readers.
Submitting a proposal
Submit an abstract of roughly 200 words, a short description of the central argument, and a brief biography. Contributions should use Australian English where appropriate, provide complete references, and make clear how they relate to Cavell, Austin, literary studies, or ordinary language philosophy. We welcome work from early-career researchers, postgraduate students, and established scholars, including proposals that grow out of teaching or public humanities practice.
Manuscripts for consideration should be accessible to readers across the two fields: define specialist terms, explain the theoretical stakes of the chosen examples, and avoid treating philosophy as decoration or literary analysis as illustration. The editorial conversation will consider the fit of the argument, the quality of its textual engagement, and its potential to stimulate further work. Proposals for reviews, curated bibliographies, archive-based guides, or teaching resources may address Cavell, Austin, Wittgenstein, or related debates when they directly support the call.
OLP & Literary Studies Online welcomes work that makes the ordinary politically audible while keeping the rigour of close reading. Submit a proposal for a paper, symposium conversation, or focused review that brings these debates into a current Australian scholarly context. Follow the submission route listed with this call, include the abstract and materials requested above, and send the proposal for editorial consideration.