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The main claim of Toril Moi's book is that ordinary language philosophy can transform our prevailing understanding of language, theory and reading in literary studies. To make good on this claim, Moi invites us to step back in time, and visit the courts of Wittgenstein's Cambridge, and the quads of J.L. Austin's Oxford. A revolution was brewing in philosophy: Wittgenstein contemplated the big questions of philosophy—the nature of free will, the idea of God etc.—and concluded that philosophy had mystified itself by posing the questions badly. Philosophy, too long mired in abstruse language, needed to spell out its difficulties in plain English. Wittgenstein did just that, and cut—with almost terrifying lucidity—through the Gordian knots of philosophy. It was less an exercise in proposing new answers to the big philosophical questions so much as showing why, in many cases, philosophy really didn't need to consider them questions at all.
Such was the revolution: translating philosophy's fuddled discourse into plain, crisp English. Winnowing commonsense from philosophy's arcane confusions. Paying attention to the ordinary, the commonplace, life and language as it is normally lived, rather than preferring the thick mists of the noumenal. The fomenters of this revolution, for Moi, were indeed Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin. The third member of this triumvirate came later—Stanley Cavell. Cavell identifies with "Emerson's and Thoreau's emphasis on the common, the near, and the low" (7). Austin wants to know how we use ordinary language. Wittgenstein says "what we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use" (7).
What, though, did this revolution have to do with literary studies? Clearly, Cavell, whose investments in literature are evident, will be one useful guide here, and the use of Austin's speech act theory in literary studies is familiar enough, but what about Wittgenstein? Moi deploys him in various ways, but one way involves simply adopting the spirit of Wittgenstein: let's get clear on the besetting problems of literary studies, less in a bid to solve them, and more in an exercise to see whether they really need be considered problems at all. The targets now come into view: literary theory, High Theory, post-Saussureans, Derrideans, and de Manians. To cut through those Gordian knots, Moi takes us on a journey divided...