Teaching ordinary language philosophy through Alice Munro
Alice Munro’s fiction offers a rigorous way to introduce ordinary language philosophy because its narrators rarely deliver unmediated truth. They qualify, joke, evade, remember and revise. A seminar can therefore examine how claims acquire force rather than treating each story as a puzzle with a concealed moral.
Working from J. L. Austin, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, teachers can connect literary attention with philosophical scrutiny of familiar concepts. The aim is not to decode authorial intention but to make participants notice the assumptions carried by ordinary words, judgements and conversational acts. Munro’s compact stories furnish sustained evidence for that practice.
Philosophy in the texture of daily speech
Ordinary language philosophy treats philosophical difficulties as problems that emerge through ordinary usage. Its questions become audible when students examine a narrator’s hesitation, a disputed description or a phrase that appears more precise than it is. This method suits Munro because her syntax records uncertainty without dismissing it as stylistic noise.
Austin’s distinction between saying something and doing something in saying it helps students identify what speech acts a passage performs. An account may assert a fact, confess a fear, apologise, warn or invite agreement. The same proposition can function differently across situations, so context matters as much as vocabulary.
Close reading can begin with one sentence and follow its shifts in mood and implication. Underlining evaluative adjectives, modal verbs and hedges reveals how a narrator manages knowledge. Comparing those markings with the surrounding action shows how language and conduct can pull apart, a conflict central to Munro’s fiction.
Cavell, ethics, and attentive reading
Stanley Cavell extends ordinary language analysis towards moral attention and recognition. His question, Must We Mean What We Say?, makes it possible to see that an apparently harmless description may carry a judgement, while evasive language may protect a speaker from responsibility. Interpretation becomes an ethical encounter rather than a contest over hidden meaning.
Wittgenstein’s idea of language-games adds a social dimension. Rules, purposes and forms of life shape what counts as following a rule correctly; no isolated word receives a final meaning outside use. Munro’s domestic conversations, local knowledge and competing accounts offer rich cases for asking how participants make sense together.
The two perspectives complement each other. Cavell sharpens attention to acknowledgement, while Wittgenstein resists turning a local usage into a rigid definition. A class can test both by asking what a character says, what the utterance does, how others respond and what the exchange reveals about their shared world.
Australian contexts for a language seminar
Munro writes about Ontario towns, but Australian students meet comparable pressures in different vocabularies: family obligation, embarrassment, bodily ageing, economic constraint and the distance between public speech and private motive. Comparison should preserve those differences rather than treating Australia as a substitute setting. It can clarify how culture becomes audible in descriptions of routine life.
Local details can enliven that analysis. Melbourne tram announcements, Canberra bus timetables and Sydney ferry conversations each organise speech through rules and shared expectations. Students may also examine the Australian habit of using recycling points at Coles or Woolworths, noting how “recycling”, “waste” and “container” shift across supermarket, council and household contexts. The local market for literary culture—independent booksellers, university campus bookshops and festival stalls—can likewise prompt discussion of how stories circulate and acquire authority.
Rather than importing local examples into Munro’s plots, students can translate interpretive questions into Australian speech. They might compare “arvo”, “bathers”, “footy” or “ute” with a narrator’s Canadian idiom, asking whether unfamiliar usage is merely local colour or changes the ethical shape of a scene.
A practical seminar sequence
Begin with paired reading and make the language problem explicit. Teachers who want alternative versions for different levels can consult narrative adaptation exercises, then return to the authorised text for detailed analysis.
Four story pairs provide productive starting points:
- “The Dimensions of a Shadow” shows how vagueness and context shape perceptual judgement.
- “Fits of Explanation” turns conflicting accounts into actions performed upon another person.
- “Passion” tests the relation between memory, self-description and conversational credibility.
- “The Albanian Virgin” links euphemism, cultural knowledge and the naming of wrongdoing.
Discussion can then move through repeatable interpretive routines:
- Mark words of certainty, doubt and qualification, then compare each narrator’s implied standards of knowledge.
- Label the principal speech acts in selected exchanges, including assertion, confession, warning and invitation.
- Rewrite one exchange to alter its force while preserving its broad topic, and discuss what context changes.
- Compare explicit judgements with patterns of behaviour, using Cavell’s question of recognition to test whether words and actions converge.
Finish by returning to the opening sentence as a class. Students can explain its later implications, identifying which assumptions the first reading missed and which later evidence complicates the account.
Assessment, copyright, and student work
An assessable task might combine an annotated passage, a 1,200-word analysis and a short teaching note explaining how an ordinary term changes meaning across two Munro stories. Oral defence of the annotation can reveal whether students distinguish a narrator’s wording from a reader’s inference. In secondary settings, the task can be aligned with analytical language study in the relevant state or territory English syllabus.
Copyright requires care. The Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), including fair-dealing provisions for criticism, review and commentary, governs many classroom uses, so teachers should check institutional guidance, use licensed copies and avoid distributing complete scans. Amount, purpose and source still require attention. University presses and local booksellers can supply editions, while a course reading list can diversify Australian writing alongside Munro.
Where classroom activities fall under the Privacy Act 1988, the Australian Privacy Principles shape how personal information is handled. Recordings, surveys and online discussion should use pseudonyms and collect only what the activity requires. Institutional privacy and records policies provide the appropriate final check.
Begin a small reading group with one Munro story and one question about what an ordinary phrase is doing. Use the OLP & Literary Studies Online archive, Cavell resources and Wittgenstein materials to deepen the first discussion.
Share the resulting bibliography, annotated passage or teaching note with fellow scholars, and contribute the language questions that emerge from the discussion to the wider scholarly community.