Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking After Cavell After Wittgenstein

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.