Lectures on conversation
by Harvey Sacks, Gail Jefferson
Category: Conversation

This project makes available for the first time the entire corpus of lectures by a writer whose thought and method influenced a generation of sociologists and sociolinguists.Originally published as two volumes, this special comprehensive single-volume edition contains the complete lectures, beginning with the lectures delivered at UCLA, from Fall 1964 through Spring 1968. Sacks explores a great variety of topics, but two key issues emerge: rules of conversational sequencing, and membership categorization devices. The lectures culminate in the extensive and formal explication of turn-taking delivered in Fall 1967.The second half contains the lectures delivered at UC Irvine from Fall 1968 through Spring 1972. Again, Sacks touches on a wide range of subjects, such as the poetics of ordinary talk, the integrative function of public tragedy, and pauses in the spelling out of a word. The central theme is storytelling in conversation, with an attendant focus on topic. The volume culminates in the elegant dissertation on adjacency pairs which Sacks delivered in Spring, 1972.