Lectures on Conversation, Volume 1 (lectures 1964-1968)

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. Originally published as two volumes, this single-volume edition contains the complete lectures of Harvey Sacks delivered at UCLA, from Fall 1964 to Spring 1968. Sacks explores a variety of topics, but two key issues emerge: rules of conversational sequencing and membership categorization devices. These are some first exchanges in telephone conversations collected at an emergency psychiatric hospital.