Ordinary Language Criticism Literary Thinking After Cavell After Wittgenstein

"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.Dauber, Kenneth is the author of 'Ordinary Language Criticism Literary Thinking After Cavell After Wittgenstein' with ISBN 9780810119604 and ISBN 0810119609.