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Conversation : a history of a declining art / Stephen Miller.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: New Haven : Yale University Press, [2006]Copyright date: ©2006Description: xv, 336 pages ; 22 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 0300110308
  • 9780300110302
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 302.346 22
LOC classification:
  • P95.45 .M54 2006
Online resources:
Contents:
1. Conversation and its discontents -- 2. Ancient conversation : from the Book of Job to Plato's Symposium -- 3. Three factors affecting conversation : religion, commerce, women -- 4. The age of conversation : eighteenth-century Britain -- 5. Samuel Johnson : a conversational triumph; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu : conversation lost.
Review: "Essayist Stephen Miller pursues a lifelong interest in conversation by taking an historical and philosophical view of the subject. He chronicles the art of conversation in Western civilization from its beginnings in ancient Greece to its apex in eighteenth-century Britain to its current endangered state in America. As Harry G. Frankfurt brought wide attention to the art of bullshit in his recent bestselling On Bullshit, so Miller now brings the art of conversation into the light, revealing why good conversation matters and why it is in decline." "Miller explores the conversation about conversation among such great writers as Cicero, Montaigne, Swift, Defoe, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Virginia Woolf. He focuses on the world of British coffeehouses and clubs in "The Age of Conversation" and examines how this era ended. Turning his attention to the United States, the author traces a prolonged decline in the theory and practice of conversation from Benjamin Franklin through Hemingway to Dick Cheney. He cites our technology (iPods, cell phones, and video games) and our insistence on unguarded forthrightness as well as our fear of being judgmental as powerful forces that are likely to diminish the art of conversation."--BOOK JACKET.
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Holdings
Item type Current library Call number Copy number Status Date due Barcode
Book City Campus City Campus Main Collection 302.346 MIL (Browse shelf(Opens below)) 1 Available A398283B

Includes bibliographical references (pages 315-328) and index.

1. Conversation and its discontents -- 2. Ancient conversation : from the Book of Job to Plato's Symposium -- 3. Three factors affecting conversation : religion, commerce, women -- 4. The age of conversation : eighteenth-century Britain -- 5. Samuel Johnson : a conversational triumph; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu : conversation lost.

"Essayist Stephen Miller pursues a lifelong interest in conversation by taking an historical and philosophical view of the subject. He chronicles the art of conversation in Western civilization from its beginnings in ancient Greece to its apex in eighteenth-century Britain to its current endangered state in America. As Harry G. Frankfurt brought wide attention to the art of bullshit in his recent bestselling On Bullshit, so Miller now brings the art of conversation into the light, revealing why good conversation matters and why it is in decline." "Miller explores the conversation about conversation among such great writers as Cicero, Montaigne, Swift, Defoe, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Virginia Woolf. He focuses on the world of British coffeehouses and clubs in "The Age of Conversation" and examines how this era ended. Turning his attention to the United States, the author traces a prolonged decline in the theory and practice of conversation from Benjamin Franklin through Hemingway to Dick Cheney. He cites our technology (iPods, cell phones, and video games) and our insistence on unguarded forthrightness as well as our fear of being judgmental as powerful forces that are likely to diminish the art of conversation."--BOOK JACKET.

Machine converted from AACR2 source record.

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