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Ordinary Language Philosophy & Literary Studies Online

Teaching Cavell's Must We Mean What We Say in a Literary Theory Seminar

For lecturers in Australian humanities departments, Stanley Cavell's Must We Mean What We Say? remains a text that rewards patient, semester-long engagement. Originally delivered as a series of essays in the late 1960s, the volume pairs literary inquiry with ordinary language philosophy in ways that make it ideal for an upper-level literary theory course. Tutors at the University of Sydney, the University of Melbourne, and the Australian National University have long used it as a hinge text between analytic philosophy and the close-reading traditions imported from abroad.

The volume's central wager — that ordinary language analysis reveals the philosophical stakes of literary expression — can feel opaque to students encountering it for the first time. Cavell writes in a register that is neither fully academic nor fully literary, and his prose rewards classroom interrogation. Many instructors pair the essays with shorter Wittgenstein fragments and with Shakespearean tragedy to give students a foothold. Because Cavell's method depends on paying attention to what we do with words, the pedagogy must too.

Why the Volume Belongs on a Literary Theory Reading List

Literary theory courses in Australia tend to oscillate between continental schools (phenomenology, critical theory, deconstruction) and the Anglo-American tradition of close reading. Cavell offers a third option that resists both poles. He treats Shakespeare, Beckett, and Yeats not as illustrations of philosophical theses but as occasions where ordinary language strains at the edges of meaning. The book's insistence that philosophical problems arise within language itself gives lecturers a way to introduce students to analytic thinking without summoning the drier conventions of academic philosophy.

Cavell's sustained attention to tragedy makes him unusually useful for courses that touch on Australian literary traditions. His account of the inevitable in King Lear can be set alongside the tragic vocabulary employed by Patrick White, Randolph Stow, or, in newer work, Alexis Wright. The comparative work that becomes possible — between Cavell's reading of Shakespeare and the tragic mechanics of postcolonial Australian writing — often energises seminars.

Sequencing the Chapters Across a Semester

The book is often assigned in a single block, but a thematic ordering around four phases works better in a tutorial setting. The first phase introduces Cavell's debt to Wittgenstein and Austin through the opening essays; the second pivots to the volume's three substantial pieces on music, tragedy, and modernism; the third isolates the Beckett material on the limits of expression; and the fourth returns to metaphysics, where Cavell reads Thoreau and the conditions of self-recognition. This sequencing has the advantage of ending the semester where Cavell ends the book — with the question of what it means to acknowledge an ordinary life.

A workable week-by-week distribution might pair each phase with a primary literary text:

Running the Seminar: Problems and Methods

Cavell's prose resists paraphrase, which is precisely why structured discussion matters. Lecturers at Monash and La Trobe have found that beginning each session with a single sentence from the assigned chapter — read aloud, twice — opens the floor productively. Students describe what the sentence commits them to, what it presupposes, and where it might be wrong. The seminar then moves outward to the literary examples Cavell cites. The method is deliberately slow, and the course outline should signal that.

Another productive exercise is a paired close reading. Two students are assigned adjacent paragraphs of an essay and asked to reconstruct Cavell's argument step by step. The remaining students record objections on a shared whiteboard. This format mirrors the ordinary language method itself: meaning emerges through the back-and-forth of reception. Where class sizes run large — common in second-year theory subjects at the University of Queensland — syndicates of four keep the depth manageable.

Assessment for Thought Rather Than Coverage

Traditional essay prompts on Cavell tend to reduce the book to its thematic catalogue. A more effective question asks students to follow a single sentence from one chapter into the literary example Cavell uses to illuminate it, and to show what ordinary language analysis reveals there. This style of assignment rewards the patience the book demands, and it produces essays that read as thinking rather than as summary. Supervisors in Adelaide and Perth have reported that these prompts yield markedly stronger work than generic comparative essays.

Assessment options that fit this ethos include:

Adapting Cavell to an Australian Classroom

Several adjustments make the volume land harder in local conditions. The Australian academic calendar compresses contact time, and tutorials often run for only twelve weeks, so lecturers typically cut the music essays and assign them as optional reading. The HECS-HELP fee structure also shapes the room: students arrive with a sharper sense of the labour value of a degree, and they tend to engage more deeply with Cavell's preoccupation with the ordinary, lived life than with abstract metaphysics.

A growing archive of Cavell-related scholarship is curated at OLP & Literary Studies Online, where tutors can find ordinary language resources for building out a theory unit. Pairing these with the Australasian Association of Philosophy conference, the Sydney Literary Seminars at the State Library of New South Wales, or the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy reading group keeps the course in conversation with the wider intellectual scene.

Readers who teach Must We Mean What We Say? this semester are invited to share their own lesson plans, prompts, or counter-readings with the OLP & Literary Studies Online editorial team, and we will collate the most useful submissions in a forthcoming teaching dossier on the site's resource page.