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Ordinary Language Philosophy & Literary Studies Online

CFP: Ordinary Language Philosophy and the Contemporary Novel

This call for papers invites contributions on the relationship between ordinary language philosophy and the contemporary novel. It welcomes work that considers how fiction represents everyday speech, shared forms of life, linguistic uncertainty, ethical attention, and the practical circumstances in which words acquire meaning.

The proposed conversation brings literary studies into contact with Wittgensteinian and Cavellian approaches to language, interpretation, scepticism, and acknowledgement. It is intended for scholars, early-career researchers, postgraduate students, and independent readers interested in how recent novels make philosophical problems visible through ordinary scenes and voices.

Language as a Literary Event

A contemporary novel may place philosophical pressure on familiar expressions without turning its characters into philosophers. A pause, correction, euphemism, joke, accusation, or change of register can expose the social work performed by language. Papers might examine how narrative form records these moments and how readers learn to attend to what is said, implied, or left unspoken.

Ordinary language philosophy offers a way to study meaning as situated activity rather than as an abstract system. This approach can illuminate dialogue, narration, reported speech, idiom, silence, and misunderstanding, while retaining the literary specificity of rhythm, perspective, and form.

Wittgenstein, Cavell, And Fiction

The CFP welcomes readings informed by Wittgenstein’s investigations of language-games, criteria, rule-following, aspect perception, and forms of life. It also welcomes engagement with Stanley Cavell’s accounts of acknowledgement, moral perfectionism, scepticism, the ordinary, and the significance of genre.

Contributors may draw on these thinkers directly or work through related traditions in literary theory and philosophy. A paper could consider whether a novel stages a philosophical argument, unsettles the demand for theoretical resolution, or shows how our difficulties arise from the uses to which words are put.

The Contemporary Novel And Shared Life

The phrase “contemporary novel” can include literary fiction, experimental prose, autofiction, genre fiction, Indigenous writing, migrant narratives, and works shaped by digital culture. Submissions may address novels from Australia or elsewhere, provided they offer a sustained account of language, social practice, and literary form.

Australian contexts may be especially productive here. A novel set between a suburban Melbourne kitchen and a tram platform, for example, can make register and belonging audible through small distinctions in speech. Work engaging with Aboriginal English, multilingual communities, or the linguistic textures of Western Sydney may also examine how institutional English interacts with lived forms of expression.

Australian Contexts And Literary Practice

The Australian publishing landscape gives this discussion a distinctive setting. University presses, literary journals, public libraries, writers’ festivals, and campus-based reading groups often connect scholarly debate with a broad literary culture. Events in Naarm, Gadigal Country, Brisbane, Perth, and regional centres can bring philosophical questions into contact with writers, teachers, and general readers.

Local speech matters as well. Words such as “mate,” “heaps,” “reckon,” or “no worries” can carry tonal and ethical force that depends on context, relationship, irony, and power. Papers may explore how contemporary Australian novels represent these nuances, including the gap between colloquial ease and the exclusions that everyday language can conceal.

Possible Areas Of Inquiry

The organisers invite proposals on subjects including:

These topics are indicative rather than exhaustive. A strong proposal might focus on one novel, compare several writers, or place a contemporary text in conversation with a philosophical or literary precursor.

Methods For Reading The Ordinary

The project encourages close reading that remains attentive to the words and situations presented by a text. Rather than treating philosophy as a set of concepts applied from outside, contributors might ask what a novel teaches its readers to notice about criteria, expectation, recognition, or the limits of explanation.

This method may be useful for analysing scenes that appear uneventful: a family meal, a workplace exchange, a classroom discussion, a hospital visit, or a message sent late at night. Such episodes can reveal how novels organise moral perception and how characters become intelligible—or remain opaque—within shared practices.

Submitting And Following The Discussion

Proposals should clearly identify the primary literary texts, explain the philosophical or conceptual framework, and indicate the contribution the paper will make to contemporary literary scholarship. Submissions may be suitable for a conference panel, symposium, special issue, workshop, or online scholarly exchange, depending on the final venue and editorial arrangements.

Researchers can follow relevant announcements, bibliographies, reviews, and calls through the OLP resource hub, which gathers materials on ordinary language philosophy and literary studies alongside dedicated resources on Wittgenstein and Cavell. The site’s archive may also help contributors locate earlier discussions and refine the vocabulary of a proposal.

Send a carefully developed abstract through the organisers’ nominated channel when submission details are released, and circulate the call among departments, postgraduate networks, literary societies, and reading groups across Australia and internationally. This is an opportunity to bring philosophical attention to the textures of fiction while showing how contemporary novels make ordinary language intellectually and ethically significant.