Call for papers: ordinary language philosophy and the lyric essay

This call invites submissions to an interdisciplinary symposium and special issue on ordinary language philosophy and the lyric essay. It brings analytic traditions concerned with usage, meaning and philosophical difficulty into dialogue with a literary form that tests the limits of the first person. Philosophy, literary studies, criticism and creative writing are all eligible fields.

Ordinary language philosophy is treated here as more than a historical school. It is an ethic of attention to familiar utterance, misdirection, metaphor and the social life of words. The lyric essay provides a complementary practice, moving among argument, recollection, scene and formal experiment while making reflection inseparable from form.

The call is especially attentive to Australian scholarship and public literary culture. Journals, university departments, festivals and small presses provide settings where philosophical prose and essayistic writing can meet. The symposium will be held in Melbourne with remote participation, allowing contributors across Australia and beyond to join.

Abstracts of 250 words are due by 30 September 2026, with notifications by 31 October. Accepted papers are due by 15 January 2027. Individual papers, curated panels and responses to the central themes are welcome; practical requirements and the submission route appear below.

Philosophy in an ordinary voice

The meeting begins from a simple claim: the sentence is not neutral packaging for thought. Following J. L. Austin, Stanley Cavell and Wittgenstein, contributors may examine how ordinary words acquire philosophical force through use, implication, silence, failure and repetition. Such work can recover the texture of an argument that formalised prose risks smoothing away.

The lyric essay makes a comparable wager from the other side of the disciplinary divide. Its shifts between voice and reflection show how a philosophical problem can be inhabited rather than merely stated. Proposals may treat the essay as method, object, ethical encounter or genre, asking how form changes what can be known, criticised or put at stake in language.

Interpretive routes

Suggested lines include language games and forms of life; performativity and self-address; irony, ambiguity and conversational repair; criticism as confession; and the ethics of writing from personal or collective experience. The relevant lineage includes ordinary language philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, autofiction and creative nonfiction, but contributors need not accept a single relation between these fields.

Papers might bring Cavell’s writing on ethics and ordinary things into conversation with the lyric traditions of Australian essayists, or examine Wittgensteinian motifs in literary criticism. Comparisons with American and European essay are welcome where they sharpen the specifically local, formal or political questions raised by the submission.

Possible forms and scopes

We welcome conference papers, short provocations of 2,500–3,000 words, and substantial essays of 6,000–8,000 words. A paper may be a close reading, a philosophical argument, a textual montage, an experiment in first-person criticism, or a rigorously documented creative-critical hybrid. Its argument should be clear enough for readers in more than one discipline.

Panels of two or three speakers may be proposed with a short rationale. Contributions drawing on unpublished archives, oral history or community knowledge should identify consent, provenance and access conditions. Interdisciplinary co-authorship is encouraged, though each author should explain the division of intellectual and editorial work in the proposal.

Australian contexts

Local conditions are part of the intellectual field, not decoration. Melbourne’s tram routes, compact inner-city blocks, bookshops, cafés and university campuses will shape the meeting’s movement and conversation; a central venue and a separate online room are planned. Sydney’s publishing networks, literary agencies and reading communities offer a distinct ecosystem for papers on institutions, circulation and the market.

Australian literary magazines such as Overland, Meanjin, Going Down Swinging, The Lifted Brow and TEXT, along with presses including Scribe and Giramondo, show the strength of a decentralized literary market. Contributors may investigate how limited print runs, subscription culture, grant schemes and public funding affect the space available for hybrid philosophical-essayistic work.

Everyday habits also matter: reading on trains, annotating in notebooks, discussing books at libraries and encountering arguments at festivals and launches. Proposals that connect these practices to notions of ordinariness will be welcome. All publication plans must observe the Copyright Act 1968, and projects involving Indigenous knowledge should follow relevant cultural and intellectual property protocols as well as informed consent.

Symposium and special issue

The two-day symposium will take place in Melbourne on 18–19 March 2027. Its format combines plenary addresses, parallel panels, informal reading groups and a public evening programme. The convenors are seeking varied paper lengths and accessible presentation formats, including audio description, captioned talks and a low-sensory online option.

Selected papers will form a special issue hosted by OLP & Literary Studies Online, with contributors retaining the right to discuss public feedback before revision. The issue will include a scholarly introduction and a curated bibliography on Cavell, Wittgenstein and the lyric essay. A small travel bursary pool is available for Australian presenters who require assistance.

Preparation and submission

Submit an abstract of no more than 250 words, a 100-word biography and a short reading or accessibility statement. Full papers should use Australian spelling where appropriate, avoid identifying details in the abstract, and provide a complete bibliography. Authors may cite primary and specialist sources beyond the proposed reading list, but should make the philosophical and literary stakes legible.

Use the submission form linked from the call on the OLP & Literary Studies Online website, select either an individual paper, a panel or a short provocation, and state any access requirements. Submissions close at 5 pm Australian Eastern Standard Time on 30 September 2026. For panel proposals, name the proposed chair and explain the papers’ collective contribution.

Bring your essay into the exchange

The strongest proposals will do more than place philosophy beside autobiography. They will show how ordinary language, lyric form and the writer’s position alter the question under discussion. A submission may be argumentative, elegiac, comic, formally self-conscious or deliberately unstable, provided its method supports sustained attention and clear scholarly communication.

Submit the 250-word abstract through the linked form by 5 pm AEST on 30 September 2026, then circulate the call among colleagues, postgraduate writers and readers in literary studies whose work crosses the boundaries of philosophical argument and the personal essay.