Conversation: A History of a Declining Art Stephen Miller (2007)

In the book Conversation: A History of a Declining Art,  Stephen Miller pursues a lifelong interest in conversation by taking a 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," Miller now brings the art of conversation into the light, revealing why good conversation matters and 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.

Credit: Adapted from Amazon

 
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•  British Gentlemen’s Clubs ** Of the 17th and 18th Centuries
•  History of Conversation ** The changing face of conversation through the ages
•  On Conversation An essay by Benjamin Franklin, the Pennsylvania Gazette, 1730

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