Stephen Miller - Conversation. A History of a Declining Art [2006][A]

Book Description
Publication Date: March 11, 2006 | ISBN-10: 0300110308 | ISBN-13: 978-0300110302 | Edition: 1st
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.

Editorial Reviews
From 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.
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From The New Yorker
Miller traces the history of conversation from Aristotle to the present day, focussing particularly on the eighteenth century. For him, the Paris salons where Diderot opined and the London coffeehouses where Dr. Johnson imbibed between aphorisms represent conversation's apogee. In America, he feels, it fared less well, even before the contemporary menace posed by the Internet, iPods, and the polarization of the political sphere. Thoreau dismissed conversation as a waste of time, and Melville thought it was a tool of con men. Miller defines conversation as the act of speaking with others without any objective other than enjoyment and exchange, and there is something conversational about his own style, which tends toward anecdote and ignores theoretical approaches that could have enriched his argument.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Reviews
"In the sublime mode of David Hume and Dr. Samuel Johnson, Stephen Miller gives us a celebration and elegy for the art of conversation. His work at once enlightens and saddens me, twin effects that fuse into one, for it is clear we can no longer inhabit a conversable world."—Harold Bloom

“In keeping with the aesthetic values of conversation, [Miller’s] own writing is both clear and witty.”—Tom D’Evelyn, Christian Science Monitor

"[A] marvelously clear and vigorous exploration of the history of conversation. . .”—Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

About the Author
Stephen Miller is a freelance writer and a contributing editor to The Wilson Quarterly. His essays on leading eighteenth-century writers have appeared in many magazines, including the Times Literary Supplement, Partisan Review, and Sewanee Review.