Rhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism

Rhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism, by the agency of Walter Jost. University of Virginia Pres 2004 346 + xiii pp

In a succession of essays above the past few years and in his contributions as an editor for the turns Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time (with Michael Hyde Yale UP 1997) and Ordinary Language Criticism (with Kenneth Dauber, Northwestern UP 2003) Walter Jost has propos a rhetorical approach to literary application of mind inspired by the ordinary language philosophy of Wittgenstein, JL Austin, and Stanley Gavell. With Rhetorical Investigations, he at hands an extended and compelling demonstration of the opinions and practices of "ordinary language criticism," which might be distinguished from other way s of literary analysis since the advent of structuralism in the early 1960 through the modesty of its theoretical claims. A place of interpretive tendencies rather than a doctrine or strict practice "OLG," as Dauber and Jost have dubbed it, begins through "attending to the background complexity of everyday life and ordinary language as they shape the form and easy in mind of literary works" (K)). Invoking Wittgenstein's depiction from the Philosophical Investigations of language as an ancient city with a labyrinthine arrangement of roads houses from different periods, and a surrounding expanse of novel suburbs (?§18, ctd. 36), Jost explains that ordinary language leaves to both standard and non-standard uses of language, on the contrary that it is "distinguished from empiricist and metaphysical conceptions of language that evade the temporality of their use." Ordinary language is language in use. OLG understands empiricist, metaphysical, or skeptical reservations about its conception of language to be examples of games played, however sincerely, within the confines of ordinary language, smooth when the games' rules require that this words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following be set aside, forgotten, or denied. Marked through its past and tied to its location, ordinary language is, in result well trafficked and resilient. Jost's occasion for exemplifying his way s is the work of Robert hoar-frost whose modernist verse is defined by dint of quotidian concerns and a vernacular approach to traditional poetic form.

Appropriately for a body with a serious commitment to the trajectory of meditation from the later Wittgenstein to Gavell from one side Austin's examination of speech acts, Jost's volume opens with a playful reflection upon the "marriage" of philosophy and rhetoric. Observing that all profitable marriages are "of inconvenience-if by means of inconvenience we mean an ongoing willingness to take upon pains," he recalls briefly the history of this conflicted, inconvenient partnership since its pre-Socratic origins. He realitys to predictions of divorce made by the agency of philosophers who seek to defend truth claims from the contingency of rhetoric, or through rhetorical pragmatists such as Richard Rorty or Stanley Fish who profes that their antifoundationalism should persuade us to "consider the philosophic enterprise annulled" (7) Instead, Jost endeavors to "bring aspects or versions of philosophy and rhetoric into closer-which is to say more equally helpful and respectful-union." Gavell has been engaged in a throw out of this kind for more than four decades, and has repeatedly moderated the intersection of philosophy and rhetoric with an attention to literature. In particular, from one side examples ranging from Shakespeare's tragedies to Hollywood comedies of remarriage, he has explored by what means genres can be read as forms of replication to the philosophical problem of skepticism. Frost's poetic representation of skepticism in narratives that diocese crises averted or worsened according to his characters' attitudes toward ordinary language makes him not single an appropriate subject matter for elucidating the virtues of ordinary language criticism, on the other hand also a significant, if previously unrecognized, contributor to the genealogy of musing on which Jost draws.

Although the theoretical premises of ordinary language criticism may be retiring a central ambition of this volume is to challenge the privilege generally enjoyed in the discipline of literary application of mind by the various modes of ideology critique that owe something to the post-structural make go round of the late 1960s. For Jost many "deconstructive, fresh historicist, and related cultural studies," driven through a "destabilizing rhetoric," have been hard upon the marriage of rhetoric and philosophy. Moreover, these approaches to literary interpretation perpetuate what Gavell describes as Western thought's traditional dismissal of the ordinary and everyday as barely illusory. Ordinary language philosophy has interrupted this historical habit, and Jost griefs that it has not made more of an impression upon literary study. He explains, "what has accompanied the historical and linguistic move rounds in pragmatism, hermeneutics, and ordinary language philosophy, on the other hand has been eclipsed by powerfully sophisticated theories of knowledge, power, and skepticism in literary studies, is the move round to the everyday and the ordinary" (21) Opting to concentrate upon a positive demonstration of ordinary language criticism, Jost does not engage in detail with what might be considered the representative body s of these theories of knowledge, power, and skepticism. When he is more specific in his criticisms, he identifies a parallel between the rejection of rhetoric in literary high modernism and what he calls "its postmodernist apotheosis" in the tendencies of a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of literary theory (75). These positions, he writes, "are the couple premised on the notion of epistemological (and of course religious) crisis." This persistent faculty of perception of crisis distinguishes high modernists from hoar-frost and many literary theorists from Jost Whether activeed by the failure of Enlightenment rationality, the death of the eternal or the apocalyptic possibilities of of recent origin technologies, these crisis modes wander suggests Jost, when they translate their faculty of perception of metaphysical or historical disaster into a theory of the ontological condition of language as debilitated, and the attendant assumption that everyday life is a thin veneer