CFP: Ordinary Language Philosophy And The Short Story

A new call for papers invites scholars to examine how ordinary language philosophy can illuminate the short story. The proposed conversation brings literary form into contact with questions about meaning, use, context, voice, silence and the practical circumstances in which words become intelligible.

This area of inquiry is especially suited to short fiction. A brief story can make an everyday phrase sound strange, expose an unnoticed rule of conversation or show how a speaker’s words acquire force through timing, gesture and social setting. Wittgensteinian language-games, Stanley Cavell’s attention to acknowledgement and scepticism, and related work in ordinary language philosophy offer several ways to describe these effects without reducing literature to an illustration of theory.

For Australian researchers, the topic also creates space for local material. A story set in a Melbourne tram, a remote Queensland community, a Sydney share house or a family gathering in Adelaide may turn on small differences in tone and assumption. The call can support work attentive to Australian English, regional speech, Indigenous and migrant language practices, and the literary cultures formed across a geographically dispersed nation.

Why The Short Story Matters

Short stories often depend on compressed acts of interpretation. A character hears “fair enough”, “no worries” or “you right?” and must decide whether the phrase offers reassurance, dismissal, challenge or care. Such expressions are philosophically rich because their meaning cannot be separated from a situation, a relationship and a shared but revisable form of life.

Ordinary language philosophy helps critics describe this instability with precision. Rather than treating ambiguity as a purely formal property, an essay might ask what a character is doing with words, what expectations make an utterance intelligible and what happens when those expectations fail. The short story’s limited space can intensify these questions, making a pause, repetition or seemingly casual remark carry structural weight.

Possible Philosophical Approaches

Submissions may engage with Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following, aspect perception, private language or the relationship between words and practices. They might also draw on J. L. Austin’s account of speech acts, Gilbert Ryle’s analysis of ordinary concepts or Cavell’s writing on criteria, acknowledgement, moral perfectionism and the ordinary.

A literary study could focus on a single story, a group of stories, a national tradition or a contemporary genre such as flash fiction. It might examine how narrative produces uncertainty about what has been said, how dialogue distributes knowledge, or how a narrator’s failure to acknowledge another person becomes an ethical and formal problem.

The approach need not treat philosophy as a vocabulary imposed on fiction. Strong contributions may instead show how literary works test philosophical descriptions by placing language under pressure. A story can reveal what a concept leaves out, especially when ordinary speech meets grief, bureaucratic authority, racism, disability, intimacy or estrangement.

Australian Contexts And Publishing Networks

An Australian contribution could consider the difference between metropolitan and regional speech, or between institutional language and the idioms used in everyday life. Work emerging from Sydney and Melbourne may sit alongside writing connected to Broome, Hobart, the western suburbs of Brisbane or regional university communities. These settings can complicate assumptions about whose “ordinary” language is being described.

The local literary economy also matters. Australian short fiction circulates through university journals, independent reviews, small presses, writers’ festivals and online publications, with Adelaide Writers’ Week and state-based literary events providing important meeting points. Researchers may find productive comparisons between scholarly criticism and the practical editorial conversations that shape a story before publication. The broader literary magazine landscape offers a useful point of connection for thinking about where contemporary short fiction is read and discussed.

Attention to Australian usage should be careful rather than folkloric. Terms such as “mate”, “reckon” or “no worries” do not carry one fixed meaning, and their force changes with class, age, cultural background, place and tone. Submissions that address Aboriginal Englishes, multilingual communities or the politics of naming can expand the field beyond a narrow model of ordinary conversation.

Preparing A Strong Submission

A persuasive abstract will identify a specific literary object and explain what philosophical difficulty it brings into view. It should distinguish between a story’s subject matter and its language practices, showing how narration, dialogue, silence or genre conventions generate the issue under discussion.

Authors may also clarify how their method relates to the tradition of ordinary language philosophy. A submission need not provide a survey of every relevant thinker, but it should indicate whether it is concerned with use, criteria, acknowledgement, scepticism, description or another connected problem.

Useful directions for an abstract include:

• Close readings of dialogue, hesitation, repetition or silence
• Studies of Australian short fiction and culturally specific speech
• Comparisons between Wittgenstein, Cavell, Austin and literary form

A proposal may also benefit from situating its archive and audience:

• A single story, author, collection or multilingual corpus
• A philosophical problem developed through formal analysis
• Implications for teaching, criticism or creative writing practice

Scholarly Conversation And Submission

The call is likely to interest literary scholars, philosophers, creative writing researchers, postgraduate students and independent critics. Contributions can encourage dialogue between disciplines that sometimes use the same words differently. “Voice”, “meaning”, “context” and “interpretation” may require careful definition when they move between philosophy, narratology and creative practice.

Australian scholars working outside the major capitals should feel included in this conversation. Online seminars and hybrid conferences have made it easier for researchers in Darwin, Wollongong, Ballarat, Townsville and other locations to participate in national discussions. The format also suits a field whose examples may come from community publishing, regional newspapers, classroom anthologies or digital fiction.

Authors should follow the call’s stated requirements for abstract length, biographies, referencing and submission method. A concise proposal can foreground the central passage or narrative problem, name the relevant philosophical interlocutors and explain the contribution to short-story studies. Clear, specific language will help editors assess the project quickly while leaving room for the full paper to develop its argument.

This call offers a valuable opportunity to investigate how literature makes ordinary speech newly visible. Send a focused proposal that brings a short story into sustained conversation with ordinary language philosophy, and share the completed work through the relevant scholarly networks and publication channels.