Conversation
A History of a Declining Art
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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 B******t, 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Miller, a freelance writer whose essays on 18th-century writers have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, laments the decline of American conversational arts. By "conversation," Miller means the discussion of great and small topics by people who practice mutual tolerance for opposing viewpoints. The author agrees with philosopher David Hume's view that "it is impossible but people must feel an increase of humanity, from the very habit of conversing together." Miller's history is itself much like a pleasant academic conversation as it meanders through a mini-history of coffee-houses in 18th-century Britain, a consideration of poet Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard" and Miller's displeasure with the counter-culture movement of the American 1960's and the current prevalence of conversation-precluding gadgets. In these latter arguments, he comes off at times as a Luddite, spewing scorn for cell phones and portable MP3 players, and if most of this book is an enjoyable and thought-provoking (if not conversation-provoking) read, Miller does manage a few missteps, as when he points to the taciturn masculinity of Hollywood westerns and Ernest Hemingway's terse writing style to bolster his thesis.
