Teaching Wittgenstein in a Literature Seminar

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations can seem an unlikely companion for a literature seminar. Its numbered remarks, abrupt examples and resistance to conventional argument do not resemble a standard work of literary criticism. Yet the text offers students a powerful way to examine how meaning is made through use, context, tone, convention and shared forms of life.

For students in Australia, this approach can connect analytic philosophy with familiar practices of close reading. A seminar in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane or Perth might place Wittgenstein beside a novel, poem or play already situated in local histories of migration, class, Country and language. The aim is not to turn literature into an illustration of philosophy, but to let each field unsettle the habits of the other.

Beginning With Literary Attention

The most productive opening is often a passage rather than a philosophical definition. Ask students to read a short sequence from Philosophical Investigations aloud, noting its changes in voice, examples and implied audience. The text’s movement between questions, imagined conversations and miniature scenes makes it especially suitable for literary analysis.

Students can then compare Wittgenstein’s method with close reading. A literary critic attends to repetition, omission, register and form; Wittgenstein attends to the circumstances in which words acquire their sense. Both practices resist extracting a single abstract meaning too quickly. The seminar becomes an exercise in describing what a passage does before deciding what it means.

This method is valuable in large first-year tutorials as well as advanced postgraduate classes. It gives students a concrete task and avoids presenting Wittgenstein as a difficult authority whose terminology must be mastered before discussion begins.

Meaning, Use And Context

Wittgenstein’s account of meaning as use provides a strong framework for studying dialogue, narration and genre. A phrase in a courtroom drama does different work from the same phrase in a love poem, a bureaucratic letter or a comic monologue. Its meaning depends on the activity in which it operates, the expectations surrounding it and the responses it makes possible.

A seminar might track a recurring word across several texts, asking when it functions as an accusation, promise, joke, ritual or evasion. This is more precise than simply asking what the word “symbolises”. It also helps students recognise that literary language is shaped by social practices rather than floating free from them.

Australian texts offer rich material for such discussion. The language of suburbia, public institutions, sport, family and work can be read alongside the language of Country and belonging in First Nations writing, while taking care not to treat culturally specific practices as interchangeable examples in a philosophical exercise. Context must remain part of the interpretation.

Language Games And Literary Form

The concept of a language game can illuminate the formal organisation of a literary work. A novel may contain competing games of confession, instruction, gossip, testimony and command. A play can expose the rules governing politeness or authority by making characters violate them. Poetry can alter a familiar language game through rhythm, compression and unexpected association.

Students might map who is entitled to speak, who must explain themselves and whose words are dismissed as nonsense. This encourages attention to power without reducing every interpretive problem to ideology. Wittgenstein’s examples also show that confusion often arises when expressions are removed from the practical setting that gives them a role.

The approach works particularly well with texts that shift genre or register. A seminar in Adelaide could pair Philosophical Investigations with a contemporary Australian novel that moves between documentary, memoir and fiction, examining how readers recognise the changing rules of each mode.

Family Resemblance And Genre

Wittgenstein’s discussion of family resemblance challenges the expectation that every category has one defining feature. This is immediately relevant to literary genre. Works called novels, elegies, satires or essays may share overlapping traits without possessing a common essence.

Students can test this idea against a small set of texts rather than memorising a definition of genre. What makes several works recognisably comic if they do not share the same plot, tone or social purpose? How does a text become literary, experimental or realist within a particular publishing and educational culture?

Such questions also open discussion of the Australian literary market. A book’s classification may be influenced by independent booksellers, university reading lists, prize categories, library catalogues and marketing language. Genre is therefore both an aesthetic pattern and a public practice, shaped by institutions that tell readers how to approach a work.

Rules, Interpretation And Reading

The sections on rule-following can help students examine interpretation without presenting reading as either mechanical obedience or unlimited personal freedom. A rule is not applied by consulting a private image in the mind; it is sustained through practices, training and shared judgements. Literary interpretation similarly depends on learned conventions, textual evidence and communities of readers.

A useful classroom exercise gives groups the same ambiguous passage and asks them to produce different readings, then identify which features make each reading defensible. The discussion can distinguish disagreement about evidence from disagreement about the purposes of reading. This is especially helpful when students assume that interpretation is merely a matter of preference.

The exercise may also connect with assessment practices in Australian universities, where students are often expected to make an original argument within recognisable academic conventions. Wittgenstein allows the class to ask how those conventions are learned, when they become restrictive and how a new interpretation can change the available language of criticism.

Voice, Silence And Forms Of Life

Wittgenstein’s concern with criteria, inner experience and the limits of private language offers a careful route into questions of voice and silence. Literary texts frequently represent experiences that cannot be fully shared, yet they do so through public forms: narration, metaphor, dialogue, genre and inherited styles. The problem is not simply whether a character’s feelings are authentic, but how a text gives those feelings a place within language.

This perspective can deepen readings of testimony, illness narratives, migrant writing and works concerned with grief or dispossession. It also encourages ethical caution. A reader should not assume that every silence is evidence of trauma, or that a literary voice transparently reveals an author’s private life. What matters is how the text establishes, interrupts or withholds the criteria by which readers recognise experience.

In a Sydney or Canberra seminar, these questions might lead to discussion of archives, public memory and the institutional settings in which stories circulate. Libraries, museums and digital repositories do not merely preserve literature; they influence which voices remain available for teaching and research.

A successful class on Philosophical Investigations should leave students with habits of attention rather than a closed system of doctrines. Encourage them to annotate examples, compare uses of words, notice shifts in perspective and describe the circumstances that make an utterance intelligible. Scholarly resources, bibliographies and conference updates can extend that work beyond the semester; readers can subscribe to OLP updates for continuing material on Wittgenstein, Cavell, ordinary language philosophy and literary studies.