This radically original book argues for the power of ordinary language philosophy--a tradition inaugurated by Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, and extended by Stanley Cavell--to transform literary studies. In engaging and lucid prose, Toril Moi demonstrates this philosophy's unique ability to lay bare the connections between words and the world, dispel the notion of literature as a monolithic concept, and teach readers how to learn from a literary text.

Moi first introduces Wittgenstein's vision of language and theory, which refuses to reduce language to a matter of naming or...