Literary History of Conversation

The "Literary History of Conversation" names a distinct scholarly tradition — rooted in French and German research programs — that tracks the cultural, aesthetic, and intellectual life of conversation as it was theorized, practiced, and represented across literary and textual forms from the early modern to the mid-modern periods. Unlike empirical or sociological approaches to talk, this tradition treats conversation as a historically sedimented object: something that has been shaped by, and in turn shaped, the genres and institutions of letters, essays, memoirs, plays, novels, dialogues, and treatises. Its method is historiographical rather than analytic; it reads texts as archives of conversational norms, ideals, and anxieties.

Within the argument of its source, this concept functions as one pole of a disciplinary dyad. The literary history of conversation supplies depth — a genealogy of what conversation has meant, valued, and performed across epochs — while Conversation Analysis (the other pole) supplies empirical granularity about how talk actually works in real-time interaction. McCormick's project is explicitly framed as a bridge between these two traditions, with the implicit claim that neither alone can account for the contemporary cultural moment in which digital communication enables what he calls a "flight from conversation."

In the source samuel-mccormick-the-chattering-mind-a-conceptual-history-of-everyday-talk-unive, the Literary History of Conversation appears on p. 14 as part of an introductory mapping of the intellectual field the book seeks to synthesize. It is positioned in explicit contrast to Conversation Analysis: where Conversation Analysis (a cross-referenced canonical concept) focuses on the fine-grained mechanics of actual spoken interaction — turn-taking, repair, sequential organization — the Literary History of Conversation attends instead to the normative and representational life of conversation in written culture. The two traditions are thus complementary rather than competing, each blind to what the other sees.

The concept also acquires its full urgency in relation to the cross-referenced notion of the "Flight from Conversation." By establishing that conversation has a rich literary-historical archive — that it has been consistently idealized and theorized across centuries of European letters — McCormick frames contemporary digital disengagement from face-to-face talk as a rupture with a long-standing cultural value, not merely a shift in communication technology. The Literary History of Conversation is therefore both the evidentiary basis for that claim and the historiographical lens through which the flight can be measured and mourned.

The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday TalkSamuel McCormick · 2020 (p.14)

Another group of inquirers emerged from French and German research programs with a keen interest in the literary history of conversation, especially as it found expression in early- and mid-modern letters, essays, memoirs, plays, novels, dialogues, treatises.

The phrase "especially as it found expression in early- and mid-modern letters, essays, memoirs, plays, novels, dialogues, treatises" is theoretically loaded because the enumerated genres collectively span the full range of early modern textual culture, signaling that conversation is not a marginal topic but a pervasive preoccupation of the literary-humanist tradition; the qualifier "found expression" further implies that conversation precedes and exceeds its textual representations, granting the literary archive an indexical rather than constitutive relation to conversational practice.