Lectures On Conversation

Lectures on Conversation

Volume I contains the lectures of Fall 1964 through Fall 1967, in which Sacks explores a great variety of topics, from suicide to children's games to Medieval Hell as a nemonic device to pronouns and paradoxes. But two key issues emerge: rules of conversational sequencing - central to the articulation of interaction, and membership categorization devices - central to the social organization of knowledge. This volume culminates in the extensive and formal explication of turn-taking which Sacks delivered in Fall, 1967. Volume II contains the lectures of Spring 1968 through Spring 1972. Again he touches on a wide range of subjects, such as the poetics of ordinary talk, the integrative function of public tragedy, and pauses in spelling out a word. He develops a major new theme: storytelling in converstion, with an attendant focus on topic. His investigation of conversational sequencing continues, and this volume culminates in the elegant dissertation on adjacency pairs which Sacks delivered in Spring, 1972.

Harvey Sacks

Harvey Sacks's early death in 1975 robbed the social sciences of one of its most original thinkers. Although he published relatively little in his lifetime, his lectures and papers were enormously influential in sociology and sociolinguistics, and they played a major role in the development of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. The recent publication of Sacks's Lectures on Conversation has provided an excellent opportunity for a wide-ranging reassessment of his contribution. In this new book, David Silverman provides a clear introduction to Sacks's work and reassesses its value for sociology, linguistics, anthropology, and psychology. Using a variety of examples, he explains Sacks's ideas on method, language and talk-interaction. He argues that Sack's work offers a highly original perspective on language and social life and raises fundamental questions for the social sciences--questions which, after more than twenty years, remain vitally important and largely unanswered. Written in a lively and accessible way, this book will be of particular interest to students of sociology, sociolinguistics, social theory and method, but it will also be of interest to students and researchers in anthropology, psychology, and related disciplines.

Lectures on Conversation