Garry L. Hagberg is the James H. Ottaway Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at Bard College. His most recent book is Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the Composition of Selfhood.

Introduction: Words at Work, Garry L. Hagberg.- Part I. Wittgenstein, Austin: Meaning and Literary Performatives.-1. 'I am, forsooth, a layman!' Flann O'Brien, Wittgenstein, and the Challenge of Ordinary Language, Andrew Gaedtke.- 2. The Poetics of the Unpoetic: Literature, Ordinariness, and Raymond Carver's Minimalist Realism, Daniel Just.- 3. Bunbury Could Not Live, That Is What I Mean: Austin's Performative Speech and Truth in the Case of Oscar Wilde, Luke Mueller.- 4. Contending with the Storm: Lear's Performatives, Julian Lamb.- Part II. The Case of Samuel Beckett.- 5. "Now I can go on!": The Collapse of Linguistic Authority in Beckett's Endgame, Greg Chase.- 6. Post-Apocalyptic Leftover: The Void of Language in Beckett's Murphy ¿and Endgame, Masoud Farahmandfar.- 7. Selves Lost and Regained: Retrospective vs. Prospective Quests forIdentity in Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, Ivan Nyusztay.- Part III. The Meanings of Words: Defining by Showing.- 8. "What is this world?": Chaucer, Realism, and Metaphysics, Darragh Greene.- 9. Consenting as an Ethical Act: On the Meaning of a Word, Robert B. Pierce.- 10. Fooling: Material Meaning-Making under Conditions of Epistemic Injustice, Hannah Walser.- 11. A State of Mind as the Meaning of a Word: J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, Garry L. Hagberg.- Part IV: Evocative and Uncanny Phrases.- 12. Rehearsing the Unexpected: Poetry and Rhythm in the (New) Age of the Poets, Ruth Parkin-Gounelas.- 13. A Window. A Word. An Inkling, Gordon C.F. Bearn.- 14. On Wittgenstein, Lydia Davis, and Other Uncanny Grammarians, Ben Roth