What is ordinary language criticism? In a series of essays on texts and figures ranging from Genesis to Don Quixote to Proust, Henry James, Martin Heidegger, and Robert Frost, this work sets out to recover ""ordinariness"" as the overlooked point of departure and return in literary studies and to point up the various aesthetic, ethical, and even metaphysical consequences that follow from that recovery. Topics include the practice of reading, the autobiographical situation in literature and philosophy, the sense of a beginning, knowledge of other minds, and the conditions of ""habitation"" in the work of Cavell and Wittgenstein.