Literature and its Language

Introduction: Words at Work, Garry L. Hagberg.- Part I. Wittgenstein, Austin: Meaning and Literary Performatives.-1. 'I am, forsooth, a layman!' Flann O'Brien, Wittgenstein, and the Challenge of Ordinary Language, Andrew Gaedtke.- 2. The Poetics of the Unpoetic: Literature, Ordinariness, and Raymond Carver's Minimalist Realism, Daniel Just.- 3. Bunbury Could Not Live, That Is What I Mean: Austin's Performative Speech and Truth in the Case of Oscar Wilde, Luke Mueller.- 4. Contending with the Storm: Lear's Performatives, Julian Lamb.- Part II. The Case of Samuel Beckett.- 5. "Now I can go on!": The Collapse of Linguistic Authority in Beckett's Endgame, Greg Chase.- 6. Post-Apocalyptic Leftover: The Void of Language in Beckett's Murphy and Endgame, Masoud Farahmandfar.- 7. Selves Lost and Regained: Retrospective vs. Prospective Quests forIdentity in Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, Ivan Nyusztay.- Part III. The Meanings of Words: Defining by Showing.- 8. "What is this world?": Chaucer, Realism, and Metaphysics, Darragh Greene.- 9. Consenting as an Ethical Act: On the Meaning of a Word, Robert B. Pierce.- 10. Fooling: Material Meaning-Making under Conditions of Epistemic Injustice, Hannah Walser.- 11. A State of Mind as the Meaning of a Word: J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, Garry L. Hagberg.- Part IV: Evocative and Uncanny Phrases.- 12. Rehearsing the Unexpected: Poetry and Rhythm in the (New) Age of the Poets, Ruth Parkin-Gounelas.- 13.  A Window. A Word. An Inkling, Gordon C.F. Bearn.- 14. On Wittgenstein, Lydia Davis, and Other Uncanny Grammarians, Ben Roth

Garry L. Hagberg is the James H. Ottaway Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at Bard College. His most recent book is Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the Composition of Selfhood.