Ordinary language criticism : literary thinking after Cavell after Wittgenstein / edited by Kenneth Dauber and Walter Jost ; with an afterword by Stanley Cavell.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Dauber, Kenneth, 1945-

Jost, Walter, 1951-

Series:

Rethinking theory

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Literature, Modern--History and criticism.

Literature, Modern.

Criticism--History--20th century.

Criticism.

History.

Cavell, Stanley, 1926-2018.

Cavell, Stanley.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889-1951.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig.

Physical Description:

xxii, 353 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Evanston, Ill. : Northwestern University Press, 2003.

Summary:

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. In a series of penetrating essays on texts and figures ranging from Genesis and Don Quixote to Marcel Proust, Henry James, Martin Heidegger, and Robert Frost, eminent literary critics and philosophers set out to recover "ordinariness" as the overlooked point of departure and return in literary studies and to examine the 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, the 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.

Contents:

Introduction: the varieties of ordinary language criticism / Kenneth Dauber and Walter Jost

Wittgenstein's philosophizing and literary theorizing / Austin E. Quigley

Stanley Cavell's redemptive reading: a philosophical labor in progress / Edward Duffy

The window: knowledge of other minds in Virginia Woolf's To the lighthouse / Martha C. Nussbaum

Ordinary language brought to grief: Robert Frost's "Home burial" / Walter Jost

Reading, writing, re-membering: what Cavell and Heidegger call thinking / Steven Mulhall

The grammar of telling: the example of Don Quixote / Anthony J. Cascardi

The shadow of a magnitude: quotation as canonicity in Proust and Beckett / William Flesch

The self, reflected: Wittgenstein, Cavell, and the autobiographical situation / Gary L. Hagberg

Cavell's imperfect perfectionism / Charles Altieri

The poetics of description: Wittgenstein on the aesthetic / Marjorie Perloff

In which Henry James strikes bedrock / R.M. Berry

"The accomplishment of inhabitation": Danto, Cavell, and the argument of American poetry / Gerald L. Bruns

Cavell and Hölderlin on human immigrancy / Richard Eldridge

Moonstruck, or, How to ruin everything / William Day

Beginning at the beginning in Genesis / Kenneth Dauber

Afterword / Stanley Cavell.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0810119579

0810119609

OCLC:

50866912