An initial investigation of the usability of fictional conversation for doing conversation analysis

This paper proposes that fictional conversations be taken seriously as objects for conversation analysis. It also goes some small way towards exemplifying such an analysis. However, the field of ethnomethodology/ conversation analysis has not been exactly quick to embrace literary materials to date, and it has been especially neglectful of fictional (literary and dramatic) dialogue. Again seriously: one may wonder why this has been the case

Hermeneutic and ethnomethodological formulations of conversational and textual talk

This paper attempts to render explicit, and then present a critique of, certain affinities between hermeneutic and ethnomethodological work on conversation/discourse that are tentatively raised in Misgeld's (1977) discussion of Habermas and gadamer. I begin by formulating the ways in which this possible parallel could be construed both (a) by overlaying a reading of sack's and Garfunkle's work onto Misgeld's consideration of Habermas and gadamer and 9b0 by taking up certain hints that Misgeld makes directly about the relation of ethnomethodology and conversational analysis to the hermeneutic project. This is the first section of the paper. It ends by posing certain gaps or omissions concerning the questions of (a) the concept of 'rule' and (b) universals versus 'open-texture' in textual and/or conversational discourse. In the second section the collective work of Garfinkle and sacks (1970) is inspected for a balanced account of the situation-specific/situation-free characteristic(s) of talk and this is offered as a counterposition to Misgeld's synthesis of Habermas and Gadamer, although it has several affinities with it. In the third section an empirical analysis is presented by way of displaying the 'open-texture'/universals problem with respect to nonconversational (textual, monologuic) discourse

History Lessons: Eagleton and the problem of the space of commentary

Terry Eagleton (1982) recently announced "the end of criticism" - but characteristically the announcement was ambiguous and by the end of his paper it is obvious enough that he is actually announcing another goal for criticism and thsi goal is not much of an advance upon the 'plain speaking' of his traditional English marxist background: We need to insist that rhetoric is a matter of inventio and dispositio,of (if you like) 'subject matter' and not just elecutio: that nothing, in short, persuades better than knowledge, and that certain kinds of knowledge are what the working class and other oppressed groups and classes in our society now need most. If one wanted a relation between 'ideology' and 'science' this late in the day, one could find it here (Eagleton 1982. p 106). The ambiguity is, however, deeper than the one concealed by a pun on 'ends': for this 'closure' of the criticism debate sits uneasily amidst a corpus which has generally eschewed closures of any kind. From the early days of Criticism and Ideology ( 1976b) and Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976a) to the recent work on Benjamin (1981), Eagleton (by which I intend a corpus of texts) has sat in similarly uneasy positions in respect of a number of traditional and recent currents in the arena of criticism and politics. This paper addresses some of the contradictions that arise in Eagleton, and its reason for doing so is to ask the question: does Eagleton furnish a distinct possibility of critique which has implications and applications of a general kind outside the domain of the purely 'literary'? It is this that I gloss by the question of the 'space of commentary'. If breadth is any indication, we should certainly expect a positive answer, judging by the manifold and diverse elements of Eagleton's 'synthesis' (if such it be). Firstly, there is a triangle of forces produced by the tension between traditional English literary criticism, formalist semiotics and the deconstructionism of Derrida and the late(r) Barthes. But into this circumscribed geometry creep other English­ Continental tensions, such as that between Derrida (1977) and Austin/Searle (1977) over the position of language generally (Fish 1982); while the node of semiotics is further displaced by its relations with Althusserian marxism and the 'structuralism/phenomenology' contradiction - not to mention the numerous Marx/Freud proto-syntheses (Marcuse, Lacan, Deleuze). This takes us to a further triangle of critical forces which play across Eagleton's texts, forces outside but often subordinated to the domain of the 'literary': namely the relations of British Marxism (Williams, Thompson, etc.) to Althusserianism and to Frankfurt School culture critique, further diffused by glances in the direction of the Brecht/Benjamin productionist thesis. And this second triangle has a further dimension insofar as it is formed in the space of the 'critical' heritage of Marx, Engels and Lukacs. Consequently, a number of traditional concerns are up for grabs: base/super­ structure separations between material conditions and literary productions v pan­ productionist annulments of that dichotomy; ideology v science; the status of liter­ature (and especially fiction) in relation to the opposition formed by science/ideology; the position of and contradiction between theory and practice; and the problems of the 'subject' and textual 'closure'. In short, a veritable array of recent politico-critical oppositionalities and contradictions. The problem for us: how to cut through this broad band of discursive forces and their objects? The task is by no means an easy one, not simply because of its size but also because readings of Eagleton are further complicated by the very presence of 'the question of read­ing' in the corpus and we need to work out just where to stand in relation to the corpus's own reading practices and how much violence needs to be done to them

Why there are no guarantees for interrogators

A good deal of human communication, especially in formal or organisational context involves parties to discursive events asking and answering questions. This paper argues that such activities can be treated as interrogative work with macro-organisational consequences. For example, the way settings are variously produced and maintained as ‘interviews’, ‘surveys’, ‘helping with inquiries’, ‘eliciting information’, ‘carpeting’, ‘debating’, and so on can depend upon the exact ways in which producers and hearers of questions ‘work’ those questions and their answers. How a question and its answer will work may turn out to depend on how they are worked. This is not always prespecifiable, but resides instead in local features of particular settings. The central focus of this paper is ‘the hearer's problem’: namely how to hear from a question what it is that is being questioned. This could be the matter in hand, the person addressed by the question, the answerer's competence, and so forth. It is argued that the bulk of the phenomena that we call ‘questions’ must be interpreted in this way by hearers before such questions' exact pragmatic status in the discourse can be fully known. In particular, questions must often be disambiguated as to whether they are straightforward elicitations of information (Q-types) or implied ‘negatives’ such as complaints, objections, warnings, threats and so on (N-types). One discovery of the present paper is that such matters are much more in the hands of persons being interrogated than in those of their interrogators. To that end, the paper acts as an empirical reinvestigation of the often assumed idea that interrogators wield more ‘power’ than those they interrogate

Book Reviews : Understanding interaction in central Australia: AN Ethnomethodological study of Australian Aboriginal people. Kenneth Liberman. Boston, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985. vii + 344pp. No price available (cloth)

No abstract availabl

Book Reviews : Marx and Wittgenstein: Social praxis and social explanation. BY David Rubinstein. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. Pp. 231. $25.00

The importance of this book must not be underestimated. Its central achievement is to put on the agenda a concept of social praxis which is radically separate from theorisations of either the subjectivity of individual actors on the one hand or a structure of transcendental social objects on the other. That this is a critical step for sociological theory is undeniable. That it can be achieved by welding hegelian Marxism with an idiosyncratically alinguistic reading of wittgenstein is open to further consideration

The organization of repair in classroom talk

This article is a conversation-analytic investigation of the forms of organization that allow specific items of classroom discourse – words, phrases, up to whole turns at talk – to be altered by subsequent items. Central to the article is an analytic distinction between self-correction and other-correction, that is, between repair sequences in which the speaker of the initial item (the “trouble source”) makes the correction and instances in which this is performed by one of her or his interlocutors (cf. Jefferson 1974; Schegloff et al. 1977). The classroom case is analytically interesting both for its own sake and also on account of research speculations that other-correction should be more frequent in adult-child talk than in other genres of conversation. However, in order to provide an analysis of the problem sensitive to the particularities of the classroom, it is necessary to look not merely at corrections, but at the larger repair trajectories in which they occur. These trajectories consist of corrections plus their prior initiations, the latter being means by which speakers mark out some item as requiring correction. Once the social identities of teacher and student are mapped against self-and other-forms of initiation and correction, it is possible to discern some of the structural preferences of classroom discourse along the general axis of repair. The materials are taken from geography lessons in Australian high school classrooms. (Repair and correction, question and answer, clue-giving, expansion sequences, modulation, classroom discourse, everyday language use, Australian English, conversation analysis, sociology of education)

Writing, Sexism and Schooling: A Discourse‐analytic investigation of some recent documents on sexism and education in Queensland

Queensland, somewhat belatedly by comparison with other States (Taylor, 1982), has recently taken up ‘sexism in schooling’ as a problem for official treatment. In the course of so doing, the Education Department has produced a number of widely distributed texts, most notably a Departmental Policy Statement. The purpose of the present paper is to examine textual production and effectivity in this context. In particular, it is argued that the production of such texts is highly constrained, especially by prior and precedential texts. In effect, there can be no ‘fresh starts’ under such intertextual conditions. These constraints on the conditions of textual production of ‘anti‐sexist’ policy, it is argued, generate policy texts fraught with contradictions. Recent work in discourse analysis is used to describe those contradictions. Further, the question is raised as to whether such policy documents are indeed anti‐sexist in their effectivity or whether, by transforming, incorporating and neutralising feminist discourse, they are effectively conservative

Book Reviews : Self-reflection in the Arts and Sciences. By Alan Blum and Peter McHugh. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1984. Pp. 159. $15.00

This book works roughly in three sections. The first establishes a number of traditional precedents for its main thesis, mostly in the forms of Husserl and Marx. The synthesis is achieved inter alia by a cross-reading which takes Marx’s concept of material conditions to refer not to economy but to the Husserlian life-world. The second opens a critique of social scientific approaches to ’self reflection’ (Simmel, Weber, Garfinkel and Habermas) which in various ways fall short of the templates established in the first. And the third works through the positive theses which ’really’ and ’all along’ underpinned the text’s search for a concept of authentic speech and action in self-reflection. To this extent, the text may best be started with its two final chapters

Book Reviews : The Social History of Language: (Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture, No.12), edited by Peter Burke and Roy Porter. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, x+219 pp. $A32.50 (paperback)

The articles in this book each work at one of three levels: the level of entire national languages (as opposed, for example, to dialects) ; the level of particular modes of verbal expression (such as proverbs or signatures); and the level of individual words and concepts (such as ’revolution’ and vertu). At first sight, a short and expensive collection of papers like this may not seem to have great appeal to Australian and New Zealand sociologists. But, in this case, taking a second look does pay dividends. There are a number of reasons why the book claims our attention. Below, I will briefly outline what I think these are before raising an objection to a central assumption behind the work