Ordinary Language for Extraordinary Loss

Abstract

Abstract:Scholarship has established the difficulty of expressing the seemingly inexpressible experience of traumatic loss. Nevertheless, there are texts that enable expression despite this difficulty. They endow expansive, elusive concepts of loss with worthy articulation. Putting trauma theory in conversation with ordinary language philosophy illuminates how such moments become conceivable. Examples from a literary tradition that stretches from Virginia Woolf to Samuel Beckett to Lydia Davis construct a potent and a public space for this work. Literature is therefore able to create new forms of utterance from which ordinary meaning gains a purchase on the extra-ordinary.