Ordinary Language Philosophy in Graduate Poetry Seminars

Ordinary language philosophy offers literary scholars a method of attention that begins where many interpretive traditions end: with the words speakers and writers actually use. Rather than treating poems as evidence of hidden depths or formal patterns alone, the ordinary language approach asks what a poem does within the community of language its readers inhabit. Graduate seminars that draw on this tradition tend to become more conversational and less hierarchical, encouraging students to test claims against the ways phrases function in everyday speech and within the poem's own controlled context.

The approach has deep roots in the work of J. L. Austin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Stanley Cavell, and it has been quietly productive in literary studies for decades. What is less commonly discussed is how it can be operationalised in a single semester, particularly for students who arrive with formalist or theoretical expectations. Australian universities, with their strong traditions in both philosophy and literary studies, provide fertile ground for such experiments.

Programs in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and Perth have increasingly hosted interdisciplinary seminars where philosophy and literature students sit side by side. A session on Cavell's reading of King Lear in a Melbourne poetry workshop, for instance, or a discussion of Austin's performatives in a Brisbane seminar on Les Murray, demonstrates the practical reach of this method.

Why Ordinary Language Philosophy Matters for Reading Verse

A poem, in the ordinary language view, is not a sealed artefact but a set of moves within a shared idiom. The reader's job is to track those moves with care, attending to the small differences between what a line says and what it shows, between what it promises and what it delivers. This kind of close attention is not foreign to literary training, yet the philosophical framing sharpens it. Students are asked to notice when a word has been asked to do too much, when an interpretive claim drifts from what the language will actually bear, and when an utterance is performing an action rather than describing a state of affairs.

This is especially useful for poetry, where every word counts and where the temptation to over-read is constant. The ordinary language method offers a corrective without becoming reductive. It treats the poem as a serious piece of language use, not a code to be cracked.

Wittgenstein, Cavell, and the Question of What We Say

Bringing Wittgenstein and Cavell directly into the seminar room changes the texture of discussion. Wittgenstein's remarks on rules, criteria, and language-games ask students to consider what internalised practices make a phrase intelligible. Cavell's work on literary perfection and the ordinary takes this further, arguing that some poems succeed in expressing what would otherwise remain unsayable, and that this success is bound up with the limits of our common vocabulary.

A seminar can productively pair Cavell's "The Unavailability of the Ordinary" with a poem the group already knows well. The friction between the philosophical essay and the verse often produces the kind of slow, patient conversation Cavell himself associated with reading. Such pairings work particularly well with Australian poets like Judith Wright, A. D. Hope, and more contemporary figures whose work negotiates inherited speech and local idiom.

Setting Up Seminar Sessions Around Language Use

The structure of a typical three-hour seminar can be reorganised around a single question, often formulated in deliberately plain English. Instead of asking what the poem means, the leader might ask what the poem is doing when it uses a particular word, or what kind of speech act the opening stanza performs. Students then prepare short position papers, usually five hundred words, that engage directly with a chosen passage.

The second half of the session can be reserved for slow reading, where the group works through a stanza line by line, with the leader drawing out ordinary language observations rather than offering interpretations. This format, modelled on Cavell's own teaching, rewards patience and rewards the kinds of noticing that often get lost in larger lecture courses.

Local Materials and Australian Case Studies

Australian literary culture offers a particularly rich archive for this kind of work. The journal Meanjin, long based in Brisbane, has published decades of poetries that test the boundaries of Australian idiom. Reading Les Murray's "The Broad Bean Sermon" alongside an Austin lecture on performative utterance reveals how locally inflected language can carry philosophical weight. Similarly, David Malouf's prose poems and Judith Wright's late lyrics invite students to test Cavell's claims about the ordinary on poetry that is itself preoccupied with the texture of Australian speech.

Where possible, seminars can visit the State Library of Victoria or the Mitchell Library in Sydney to consult original drafts. Manuscript variants, when read through an ordinary language lens, become evidence of writers solving particular problems of saying.

Assignments That Test Philosophical Attention

Assessment should reward the kind of careful attention the seminar practises. A short exegesis, perhaps twelve hundred words, asking students to follow a single word or phrase through a poem, can do more pedagogical work than a sweeping thematic essay. Comparative papers that place a poem alongside a philosophical essay, Cavell on Emerson alongside an Australian Romantic poem for example, can also work well in a graduate context.

Group presentations, modelled on the conversational style of an Oxford tutorial or a Sydney tutorial, give quieter students a chance to develop an extended line of thinking without the pressure of whole-class performance.

Practical Exercises for Weekly Seminars

• A weekly word-tracking exercise, where one student follows a single term through a poem and the philosophical reading assigned alongside it.
• Paired close readings, in which two students prepare complementary accounts of the same stanza, then test them against each other in open discussion.
• A rotating language journal kept by each student, recording phrases from lectures, news, and reading that bear on the week's poet.
• An end-of-semester symposium modelled on a small conference, with twenty-minute papers and a Cavell-style open conversation.

If you teach at an Australian university and are designing or revising a graduate poetry seminar, consider sharing your reading lists, assignment prompts, and session plans through the OLP and Literary Studies Online archive. The site welcomes contributions from convenors and postgraduate students working at the intersection of philosophy and literary study, and your notes could become a valuable resource for colleagues in Adelaide, Hobart, Canberra, and beyond.