Lectures on Conversation, Volumes I and II

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 taught in the Department of Sociology at UCLA and in the School od Cocial Science, University of California, Irvine, from 1964 until 1975, when he was killed in an automobile accident.

Gail Jefferson has held teaching and research positions in Conversation Analysis at various universities in the USA, England, and the Netherlands where she now resides.

Emanuel A. Schegloff is Professor of Sociology at UCLA.