This stimulating volume brings together an international team of emerging, mid-career, and senior scholars to investigate the relations between philosophical approaches to language and the language of literature. It has proven easy for philosophers of language to leave literary language to one side, just as it has proven easy for literary scholars to discuss questions of meaning separately from relevant issues in the philosophy of language. This volume brings the two together in mutually enlightening ways: considerations of literary meaning are deepened by adding philosophical approaches, just as philosophical issues are enriched by bringing them into contact or interweaving them with literary cases in all their subtlety.

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