Ordinary Language Criticism : Literary Thinking after Cavell after Wittgenstein - Softcover

9780810119604: Ordinary Language Criticism : Literary Thinking after Cavell after Wittgenstein

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810119609 ISBN 13: 9780810119604

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2003

Marking a return of literary study from the remote reaches of abstraction to the realm of the immediate, the particular, and the real in which language and literature truly live, the essays in this volume articulate a productive, new critical approach: ordinary language criticism. With roots in the ordinary language philosophy derived especially from Wittgenstein in the early twentieth century, and in the ideas of American pragmatic philosophy propounded and extended by Stanley Cavell, this approach seeks to return criticism to its grounds in the natural language we all speak; to expose the terms of our engagement with narratives, arguments, and concepts-what Wittgenstein and Cavell call the "criteria" of our writing and reading.

Resisting master formulations and overarching theories, Ordinary Language Criticism does not so much dismiss the excitement of the last two decades of literary theorizing as it reminds us of the excitement of the shared common enterprises to which theory may still contribute. In this, the volume and the model it offers have wide implications for the academy, in which a widespread ersatz-sophistication has shorted the circuit between literary works and the real lives of those reading and teaching them.

With a definitive introduction by editors Kenneth Dauber and Walter Jost, and elaborations and practical examples by major figures such as Cavell himself, Martha Nussbaum, Marjorie Perloff, Anthony Cascardi, and Charles Altieri, among others, this volume clearly shows and explains how ordinary language criticism differs from current trends and what it exactly it can accomplish in theory and practice. These essays prove that by attending more faithfully to what we actually do when we read, we can make reading more productive--can reveal how extraordinary and rich, how really sophisticated, the ordinary actually is.

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Book Description:

"Revolutionary change creates exiles, new qualifications for advancement, new forms of address, new silences. Ordinary language criticism is invoked by the editors as an avenue of liberation from what were felt to be, let's say, conformities to system, ones having the effect of a kind of inhibition . . . of reading, as though what was felt to be a fetishized response to texts had become transformed into a phobic response. I felt something of the sort of liberation on encountering Wittgenstein and Austin . . . ." -- Stanley Cavell, from the Afterword
A major intervention into the question of the uses of literature, Ordinary Language Criticism proposes a radical paradigm shift away from the kinds of literary criticism that have dominated the academy for the last two decades and more. What is ordinary language criticism? In a series of penetrating essays on texts and figures ranging from Genesis to Don Quixote to Proust, Henry James, Martin Heidegger, and Robert Frost, an eminent group of literary critics and philosophers sets out to recover "ordinariness" as the overlooked point of departure and return in literary studies and to point up the various aesthetic, ethical, and even metaphysical consequences that follow from that recovery. Among the issues they discuss are the practice of reading, the autobiographical situation in literature and philosophy, the sense of a beginning, knowledge of other minds, and the conditions of "habitation" in the work of Cavell and Wittgenstein. Each author is a master of close reading, yet each also operates within generous expanses of context and history.

About the Author:

Kenneth Dauber is a professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of The Idea of Authorship in America.
Walter Jost is an associate professor of English at the University of Virginia. He has recently completed a book entitled Rhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism.

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