Published in 2017 by University of Chicago Press, Toril Moi’s Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies After Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell makes a powerful argument for what literary scholars stand to gain from engaging with the tradition of ordinary language philosophy (OLP), as inaugurated in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, and Stanley Cavell. Moi argues that OLP offers an alternative to the hermeneutics of suspicion, an intrinsically skeptical mode of reading that has long exerted a commanding influence on the field of literary studies. Whereas suspicious readers contend that apparent truths need to be deconstructed and hidden ones brought to light, OLP asks us to consider the uses of particular words in particular contexts by particular speakers; as Moi shows, this vision of language frees us from the idea that “texts have surfaces and depths.” Moi argues that we should instead understand “reading as a practice of acknowledgment,” founded on the premises that “words reveal the speaker” and that “utterances, like other actions, have consequences.” Moi also refutes the charge (leveled by Ernest Gellner, among others) that attending to the ordinary is somehow reactionary or conservative, emphasizing that “[c]alls for uprising and revolution are also made in ordinary language.”

This panel brings together a group of early career scholars whose work has been informed by Moi’s. It proposes some strategies by which literary scholars and philosophers alike might carry forward Moi’s Revolution. How might we use her insights to generate new readings of literary texts? What might her work tell us about particular genres, such as the memoir or the essay? In what ways might OLP help to clarify the relationship between our reading practices and our larger lives in language? While Moi’s book serves as the panel’s primary point of departure, panelists may also refer to the work of other scholars who have explored the intersections of literature and OLP, including Richard Eldridge, Charles Altieri, Marjorie Perloff, Sarah Beckwith, David Rudrum, and Michael LeMahieu.

First, Greg Chase shows how Moi’s vision of reading as a practice of acknowledgment illuminates Richard Wright’s memoir Black Boy (1945). Black Boy takes up the question of how, if at all, racialized others might have their pains acknowledged within a culture that stubbornly twists the meanings of their words. In Must We Mean What We Say (1969), Cavell notes “that we language and learn the world together, that they become elaborated and distorted together”; Wright helps us to see that this more general statement does not sufficiently account for the specific kinds of linguistic distortion Jim Crow racism enforces. Wright’s memoir shows how much his younger self understands about the ways language maps onto the world, but it also shows how little of this understanding he can express. In recounting his childhood interactions with white interlocutors, Wright repeatedly represents in language the inability of language to effect an acknowledgment of his humanity. Though he struggles to receive much acknowledgment at the diegetic level, Black Boy nonetheless shows Wright’s ongoing faith in the capacity of language to effect acknowledgment: with this sustained, first-person account of his experiences, Wright offers readers an avenue into his inner life, one that transcends the rigidly controlled language games of his youth.

Next, Dan Dixon asks: How does the way we come to know an author resemble the way we come to know a person socially? His paper argues that the experience of reading shares emotional ground with our social lives, and that literary studies should pay attention to affective attachments readers experience that resemble those they might have with the people they know. Moi’s book opens a path for understanding texts as experiences that reward attention to details and particulars, rather than as representations from which one can generalize. Dixon proposes that one might speak of social relationships in the same way. Specifically, he focuses on the demeanor of friendliness, a criterion that describes social potential. His argument is not that readers or scholars should treat authors exactly as they treat friends, nor to have them read so generously that they forgive manipulation or deception. Rather, his paper suggests that we appreciate our connections to authors with the same degree of particularity with which we appreciate our connections to the people in our lives. To make this argument, Dixon focuses on two essays, one by Janet Malcolm, the other by Montaigne, and examines how these authors express their character by performing friendliness and unfriendliness, building a picture of themselves that looks something like a person the reader is getting to know.

Lastly, working from Moi’s point that words’s meanings come from use, and not from some overarching framework or theory, Hannah Kim shows how the “realist spirit” of OLP also helps analytic philosophy overcome theoretical blind spots. Though it is common knowledge in literature departments that fiction writers use a text’s visual and sonic qualities to communicate what is true in fiction, current philosophical theories of fiction only focus on fictional truths that are created in virtue of what is said, which leaves out how formal, non-semantic features such as font size, italics, and repetition contribute to the generation of fictional truths. This oversight comes from philosophers failing to look at specific examples from literature. OLP reminds us of the fundamental importance of paying attention to particular cases, and when we properly observe how fictional content is generated, we see that often, non-semantic features of language contribute to fictional truth. In addition to literary criticism, philosophy of fiction must begin with the question “why this?” regarding some feature of the text. Fiction-making is its own language game, and paying attention to how language is actually used in the game shows that any satisfactory theory of fictional truth must account for the work semantic and non-semantic aspects of language do in fiction.

Each panelist will speak for no more than 15 minutes, before Moi herself delivers a 10-minute response. The panel will conclude with approximately 15-20 minutes for questions or comments from the audience.