Northwestern Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking After Cavell After Wittgenstein (Rethinking Theory)

What is ordinary language criticism? In a series of essays on texts and figures ranging from Genesis to Don Quixote to Proust, Henry James, Martin Heidegger, and Robert Frost, this work 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. Topics include 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. Review 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 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 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). 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.