OLP & Literary Studies Books: 2000 – 2008

[First posted 6/18; last updated 7/31]

What this is (short version): A list of books, published between January 1, 2000 and December 31, 2008, that either work at the intersection of OLP and literary studies, or would clearly be of interest to scholars who do. This list is a work in progress. Please suggest additions.

(Click here to jump directly to the list of books)

What this is (longer version): One of the goals of this blog is to publicize new books that we think will interest scholars working at the intersection of ordinary language philosophy and literary studies. As a start, we’ve already devoted posts to the recently published Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature (edited by Richard Eldridge) and the forthcoming Evil and Silence (by Richard Fleming), and we’ve also linked to an NDPR review of Stephen Mulhall’s recently published book on J.M. Coetzee and the relationship between philosophy and literature, entitled The Wounded Animal. Because such announcements will inevitably be pushed further and further down the main screen of the blog as new posts are added, we’ve created a list of the titles of such featured “new and forthcoming” books at the upper right of the blog’s screen: the books’ titles are linked to the blog posts in which they are first mentioned. We’re not yet sure how long we’ll let that list of new books become, but at some point, as more titles are added to it, older books will be removed (perhaps we’ll let the list grow to 10 or so titles? We’ll see). We hope this practice will give the book titles continuing visibility as the original posts about them recede in both time and (screen) space.

(As we’ve said before, please email one of the blog editors if you’d like to suggest another new or forthcoming book that you think should be featured on this blog, and please don’t hesitate to suggest a new book of your own!)

Of course, there are many important books published before the beginning of this year that might have been featured on this blog, had it been created more than just a week ago. But the fact that those books have been in print for a while now is no guarantee that those readers (like the various readers of this blog) who would be most interested in them already know of their existence. We’re all familiar with the experience of stumbling upon a wonderful book, right up our intellectual alley, as it were, that somehow eluded our awareness for two, three, or even many more years after its initial publication. To make sure that doesn’t happen to relatively recent (but not quite new) books that either work at the intersection of OLP and literary studies, or would clearly be of interest to scholars who do, we’ve decided to start compiling a list of such books published since the beginning of 2000.

We’ll get things started, and add more titles over time, but please suggest your own additions to this list, either by emailing us, or by leaving your suggested titles in the comments to this post. As more titles are collected, we will add them (and whenever possible, images of the books’ covers) to the main list in the body of this post (see list below). Hopefully, we’ll eventually compile a handy list of OLP & literary studies-related books published between Jan 1, 2000 and Jan 1, 2009.

If this modest experiment in collective bibliography proves successful, we may, in a future post, begin to catalog important articles and essays related to OLP and literary studies as well.

Just as a start, I’ll begin by listing some (11) relevant books which have been published since the beginning of 2005. Know of others published since 2005 that aren’t listed below? Or any published since 2000? Let us know! We’ll add more titles ourselves over time, but please suggest your own additions to the following list…

[note: book titles sorted alphabetically by last name of primary author or editor]

J.M. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (2006)

(includes extended discussions of the aesthetics of Cavell and Fried)

Brett Bourbon, Finding a Replacement for the Soul: Mind and Meaning in Literature and Philosophy (2004)

Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (2005)

Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (2006)

Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking, Cary Wolfe (ed.), Philosophy and Animal Life (2008)

Stanley Cavell and William Rothman (ed.), Cavell on Film (2005)

Robert Chodat, Worldly Acts and Sentient Things: The Persistence of Agency from Stein to DeLillo (2008)

Alice Crary, Beyond Moral Judgment (2007)

Alice Crary, ed. Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond (2007)

Alice Crary and Rupert Read, eds., The New Wittgenstein (2000)

Alice Crary and Sanford Shieh, eds. Reading Cavell (2007)

Kenneth Dauber and Walter Jost, eds., Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after Wittgenstein (2003)

Richard Deming, Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading (2008)

Richard Eldridge, Literature, Life, and Modernity (2008)

Richard Eldridge, ed., Stanley Cavell (2003)

Shoshana Felman, Stanley Cavell (new foreword), Judith Butler (new afterword), The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J.L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages (2002, new ed.)

Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (2007)

Richard Fleming, First Word Philosophy: Writings on Ordinary Language Philosophy (2004)

Michael Fried, Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (2002)

(contains extended discussion of Cavell’s notion of the “everyday”)

John Gibson, Fiction and the Weave of Life (2008)

Garry Hagberg, Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness (2008)

John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer, The Literary Wittgenstein (2004)

Russell Goodman, ed., Contending with Stanley Cavell (2005)

(all the essays in this volume are strong, but literary scholars will be particularly interested in Garrett Stewart’s contribution, which reflects on the general “avoidance” of Cavell within literary studies)

Espen Hammer, Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity, and the Ordinary (2002)

Walter Jost, Rhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism (2004)

Sabina Lovibond, Ethical Formation (2002)

Andrew H. Miller, The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (2008)

Toril Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy (2006)

Ludwig Nagl and Chantal Mouffe, eds., The Legacy of Wittgenstein: Pragmatism or Deconstruction (2001)

(especially recommended in this volume is an essay by Hilary Putnam on the debate between Steven Affeldt and Stephen Mulhall on the proper interpretation of Cavell’s notion of criteria)

Andrew Norris, ed., The Claim to Community: Essays on Stanley Cavell and Political Philosophy (2006)

William Rothman and Marian Keane, Reading Cavell’s the World Viewed: A Philosophical Perspective on Film (2000)

Lawrence Rhu, Stanley Cavell’s American Dream: Shakespeare, Philosophy, and Hollywood Movies (2006)