CFP: Wittgenstein and Literature

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Call for papers - Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio www.rifl.unical.it

Vol. 20, N. 2/2026   Wittgenstein and Literature

Edited by Marcello Di Massa and Wolfgang Huemer

Invited contributors:

Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, University of Hertfordshire

Severin Schroeder, University of Reading

Submission deadline: June 10, 2026

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In recent decades, the relationship between Ludwig Wittgenstein and literature has increasingly become a fertile and promising area of inquiry. Although Wittgenstein rarely addressed the topic of literature explicitly, his way of doing (and writing) philosophy can be taken to open up fresh and illuminating perspectives on questions concerning our engagement with literary and fictional works, as well as on the task of investigating literary language and, more broadly, literature as a linguistic and social phenomenon.

Stanley Cavell’s writings provided an early stimulus for bringing Wittgenstein into dialogue with literature, and several studies have drawn on his example, while others have pursued more independent paths. Taken together, scholarship has thus developed in a variety of directions.

Some scholars, taking into account the aesthetic dimension of Wittgenstein’s writing and his two works with the strongest authorial imprint (the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations), have placed him within the historical and cultural context of European modernism, examining formal and rhetorical affinities. At the same time, Wittgenstein’s philosophy has been used in literary studies as a healthy counterweight to the theoretical excesses of the major strands of twentieth-century literary criticism, bringing to the fore a methodology more open and attentive to the way language acquires meaning and value within the diverse contexts of human life. Here, the appeal to the resources of ordinary language philosophy and to the practical, social, and existential dimensions of everyday life plays a central role.

Other scholars have instead employed tools and insights taken from Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language to respond to issues that have shaped contemporary aesthetic reflection on literary language, above all, the problem of the cognitive value of literature. In this context, Wittgenstein-inspired perspectives draw upon the idea that literature offers a form of non-propositional knowledge, making available to the reader a presentation of the interweaving of forms of life, cultural practices, and concepts that are “the expression of our interest” (PI § 570). This often hangs together with a particular emphasis on the ethical dimension of our engagement with reading, which calls for the activation of the moral imagination in exploring the conceptual organisation of different points of view on the world, as exemplified, for instance, in the work of Cora Diamond.

As has recently been suggested (John Gibson), Wittgenstein may thus serve as a shared common ground for philosophers and literary scholars, especially (but not only) by virtue of the nuanced quality and openness of his reflections on language and the ways it is interwoven with life. It is sometimes observed that the analytic tradition works with overly narrow conceptions of such notions as ‘truth,’ ‘meaning,’ and ‘knowledge,’ which generate paradoxes or strong tensions once applied to the aesthetic domain of literary language—in a way that makes it difficult for literary scholars to acknowledge the issues as taking shape in those terms. What motivates certain scholars to turn to Wittgenstein is precisely the possibility of adopting a broader view of language: for instance, by developing a conception of meaning “as rooted in practice” (Bernard Harrison); by approaching literary language as a domain in which the sense of our concepts and criteria is displayed; or, again, by pursuing a non-reductive way to account for the broader ethical significance of the aesthetic experience of reading.

Moreover, Wittgenstein’s philosophical method invites us to critically reconsider the way “traditional” questions have been framed in philosophical reflection on literature—indeed, questions that have at times taken the form of theoretical puzzles concerning the truth, knowledge and values that literature may afford. The idea is that Wittgenstein’s method may offer resources for rethinking debates about literary meaning and literary understanding by showing how certain problems emerge from misleading or limited pictures of language and its relation to the world. Unsurprisingly, Wittgenstein’s anti-dualistic spirit has sometimes served to diagnose and dismantle false oppositions—for example, between reality and fiction and, correspondingly, between ordinary and literary language. In doing so, it promotes an anti-dichotomous attitude characteristic of his philosophical approach and claims the complexity of linguistic operations as they unfold in the literary domain.

In this way, we believe that Wittgenstein’s philosophy proves sufficiently subtle to provide a basis for a productive and methodologically sensitive dialogue with literature understood as a family of different practices. It also offers resources for a fruitful interaction with the multifaceted network of concrete practices that revolve around literature—such as literary studies and literary criticism—without generating explanatory accounts that drift away from the reality of the practices themselves. This suggests that there remain unexplored directions at the intersection of Wittgenstein and literature that deserve to be examined and pursued from both sides.

Papers exploring, but not limited to, the following topics are welcome:

-          Uses of Wittgensteinian topics such as practice, language-games, grammar, meaning as physiognomy, aspect perception, etc. for the analysis of literary texts

-          Wittgenstein’s writing style as a model for engaging with literary language

-          The relationship between philosophical language and literary language

-          Wittgenstein and poetic language

-          Wittgenstein’s style and its connection to imagination in literary and fictional practices

-          Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophy as a resource for literary criticism and understanding literary language

-          Rule-following, criteria, and the shaping or subversion of literary conventions, genres, and other narrative practices

-          Forms of life, shared criteria, primitive reactions, and literary interpretation and critical appreciation

-          The sense/nonsense distinction in literary language and critical interpretation

-          Applications of Wittgenstein’s method to debates about literary meaning and value

-          Wittgensteinian approaches to rethinking traditional problems in the philosophy of literature

-          The significance of Wittgenstein’s anti-theoretical method for approaching literary texts

-          The fact/fiction distinction and the Wittgensteinian use of fictional scenarios for clarifying the grammar of concepts

-          Literary understanding as a process of “assembling reminders” or displaying what we already know

-          The ethical significance of the experience of reading

-          Reading pleasure, aesthetic engagement, and the transformative value of literature

-          Prospects for Wittgenstein-inspired approaches to literature

-          …

We call for articles in Italian, English and French. All manuscripts must be accompanied by an abstract (max 250 words), a title and 5 keywords in English.

The manuscript must be prepared using the template at this link:https://rifl.unical.it/authortemplate/template_eng.doc.

All submissions must be prepared by the author for anonymous evaluation. The name, affiliation to an institution and title of the contribution should be indicated in a file different from that which contains the text. The contribution must be sent in electronic format .doc or .rtf to [email protected].

Instructions for authors:

Maximum contribution length:

40000 characters (including spaces) for articles (including bibliography and endnotes);

Submission deadline:

Publication: December 2026