About

This site was founded by Bernie Rhie in June of 2009. In February of 2013 Carly Lane stepped in as editor. Until August 2017, this site was regularly updated with announcements of new publications, upcoming events, and other items of interest to students & scholars working at the crossroads of Ordinary Language Philosophy and Literary Studies. It remains available as an archive, but is no longer being updated.

If you are interested in learning more about OLP & Lit and/or sharing resources with students & scholars in the OLP & Lit community, please join the eponymous Facebook Group: “Ordinary Language Philosophy & Literary Studies,” established in August of 2017. 

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[Note: The below serves as a guide to how we have managed this site over the last several years. If you have materials to share with the OLP & Lit community, please do not submit these to the editors of this site. Rather, join the Facebook Group and post the materials yourself. If you have questions about how to do this, you may email Carly Lane]

Welcome to OLP & Literary Studies Online, an academic blog run by, and for, scholars who work at the crossroads of ordinary language philosophy (OLP) and literary studies. Look here for news about OLP and literary studies-related publications and events, including CFP’s, conferences, lectures, symposia, reviews, articles, and books. We invite you to browse through the site page by page (we suggest that you begin with the blog’s Home page) or, if you’d like to see a complete list of all the posts ever published on the blog, please consult the site’s Index. Look here for news about OLP and literary studies-related publications and events, including CFP’s, conferences, lectures, symposia, reviews, articles, and books. We invite you to browse through the site page by page (we suggest that you begin with the blog’s Home page) or, if you’d like to see a complete list of all the posts ever published on the blog, please consult the site’s Index.

We’d also like to draw your attention to some OLP-related bibliographies we’ve compiled (like this bibliography of secondary writings about Cavell), which we hope will be of use to the scholarly community: you can find them listed in the “Bibliographies” section of the column that runs down the right-hand side of the blog’s Home page. We intend to add more bibliographies in the future.

If you like what you see here and would like to be notified when new posts are published, please sign up for a subscription. And while you’re visiting us, please take a moment and sign our guestbook!

To suggest materials for a new post, or if you experience any problems with the blog or its multimedia content, please email Carly Lane, the site’s administrator and lead editor (and please write “OLP” in your email’s subject line).

To email one of the individual editors, please click on the appropriate name below:

Carly Lane, University of Chicago

Carly Lane is the administrator and lead editor of OLP & Literary Studies Online. She is a PhD student in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Her work is positioned at the broad intersection of Philosophy, Literature, and Religious Thought.  In it she takes up — among other things — the interrelatedness of one’s relationship to oneself, one’s relationship to the other, and one’s relationship to the divine, in self-overcoming. She is especially interested in the phenomenologies of relation and associated perfectionist ethics developed by Stanley Cavell and Emmanuel Lévinas. In this context, themes of finitude and tragedy loom large for her. In addition to managing this site, she coordinates the University of Chicago’s Literature & Philosophy Workshop.

Byron Davies, Harvard University

Byron Davies is a PhD student in the Philosophy Department at Harvard University. Byron works in moral psychology, aesthetics, as well as social and political philosophy and its history (especially the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau). Long a fan of the writings of J.L. Austin, Stanley Cavell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Byron has among his philosophical interests the connection between, on the one hand, Cavell’s notion that “we live our skepticism” toward others (The Claim of Reason, p. 440) and, on the other hand, social and political treatments of the commodification and reification of persons (in writers such as Rousseau, Marx, and Lukács). He is also interested in issues regarding speech and language, including the nature of illocution and the phenomenon of speaking for others. His contribution to a symposium on Cavell’s book Little Did I Know appeared in Modern Language Notes in 2011. Byron is also a painter, and he has written on philosophy and film. You can visit his personal website here.

Dalmar Hussein, University of Chicago

Dalmar Hussein is a PhD student in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, where his research covers 19th and 20th century philosophy of religion. When weather in Chicago forces him to scrap plans to play soccer, he spends his time thinking about how beliefs – particularly where these are defined by one’s membership in or involvement with multiple publics (religious, scholarly, and cultural, say) – get pitched to persons who don’t share the ties or commitments of those doing the pitching. Practical philosophy, understood broadly to include ethics and political philosophy, looms as an area of special interest in his work, as do the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, and Cora Diamond.

Patricia Marechal, Harvard University

Patricia Marechal is a PhD student in the Philosophy Department at Harvard University. She works primarily in ancient philosophy, in particular the intersection of ethics and aesthetics in Aristotle and appeals to the ordinary in Greek tragedy. Originally from Buenos Aires, she is also interested in Latin American literature and cinema as well as the influence of Marxian and radical thought in South American culture. She has written on anti-narrative movements in Argentine prose and film, emphasizing perspectival and embodied dimensions of the ordinary. Her writing has drawn upon the philosophical work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Benjamin, Wittgenstein and Cavell.

Yi-Ping Ong, Johns Hopkins University

Yi-Ping Ong is Assistant Professor in the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University. She works primarily on the literature and philosophy of ordinary life in the 19th and 20th centuries, on contemporary Anglophone literature, and on theories of moral community in the novel. Her article “A View of Life: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and the Novel,” appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of Philosophy and Literature, and she has an article on the language of advertising and Naipaul forthcoming in Twentieth-Century Literature. To visit her Humanities Center webpage, please click here.

Magdalena Ostas, Boston University

Magdalena Ostas received her Ph.D. from the Literature Program at Duke University, and she is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Boston University. She works in the areas of Romantic literature and culture as well as literary, cultural, and aesthetic theory broadly conceived. Her current book project in progress, tentatively titled Romanticism and the Forms of Interiority: Poetry, Narrative, Theory, looks at the relationship between emergent pictures of subjectivity and selfhood in Romantic-era writing (Kant, Wordsworth, Austen, Keats, and others) and their relation to questions of literary form, aesthetics, and expression. She is also interested in intersections and interrelations of literature and philosophy, with emphasis on the nineteenth century as well as in the tradition of Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell. She is at work on a second project on Nietzsche’s theories of art and aesthetics. To visit her Boston University webpage, please click here.

Corina Stan, Duke University

Corina Stan is an Assistant Professor of Literature at Leiden University College, the Hague, where she also coordinates the Brill-Nijhoff Writing Institute. She received her Ph.D. from the Program in Literature at Duke University, with a dissertation entitled The Art of Distances or, a Morality for the Everyday. She has published, in Romanian journals, an essay on the dream-theater of Strindberg and Adamov and translations from the poetry of Yves Bonnefoy; a review-essay on Jonathan Culler’s Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction on the website of the French research group in literary theory, Fabula; and articles in the Spanish section of the Dictionary of Art Historians (ed. Lee Sorensen, Lilly Library). She is interested in theories of everyday life, the sociology of intellectuals, twentieth-century comparative literature (British, French and German) and its intersections with philosophy, especially moral philosophy. To visit her personal webpage, please click here.