慶應文 2010

The word 'conversation' comes from the Old French word 'conversed ('con' means 'together'), which means 'to keep company with', and this implicit meaning is important - conversation is keeping company through words. It is at the heart of social interaction. It is always done with others, even if those others are imaginary people inside your own head. Another word we use to describe conversation is 'dialogue', which comes from the Greek word 'dialogos', a word made up of two parts: 'dia', which means 'between two', and 'logos', which means 'word'. Dialogue then means the speaking that passes backwards and forwards between two or more people.

Conversation is vital to our development and fulfilment as human beings. Relationships are formed and developed through talk, in groups of two or more. Conversations are not necessarily about anything very important. (1)Sometimes the act of talking and communicating is what matters, rather, than the content of the speech. Think of the number of conversations that you have on any given day. They are all different, serve different purposes and occur in different contexts. Some may be telephone or e-mail conversations, others may be face-to-face. (2)Qn a given morning, you will most likely find yourself in a series of different conversations or discussions: a chat with a partner or flatmate over breakfast about the day ahead, a brief interchange with the postperson or the bus conductor, a group discussion meeting at work, or a seminar group at college, a conversation with a friend or colleague over lunch. Sometimes conversations go smoothly and we come away feeling that we have successfully conveyed certain information, that we have become closer to someone or found out more about them. In the Canadian writer Carol Shield's novel Larry's Party (1998), the narrator describes the protagonist Larry Weller's ongoing conversation with his colleague in the florists where he works:

He and Viv talk all day long. They've been talking for twelve years, an unceasing, seamless conversation.... Larry and Viv hold it steady and fluid with their voices, his, hers - talking, talking, all day the two of them talking.

Larry and Viv's conversations flow naturally and easily. On the other hand, conversation can leave us feeling uneasy or worried that we have offended someone. We may have said too much, or too little, been too direct or fudged around an issue. We may have been with a larger group and felt we couldn't get a word in, or feel we dominated the conversation and bored everyone. Analysing how conversation works can help us to be more in control of group-speaking situations. (3)We can be aware of when a conversation or discussion is taking a course we would rather it didn't take. We can think more about the context or body language of our conversations. We can improve or alter our conversational style in certain situations.

Studying conversation in different cultures at different historical moments can tell us much about those societies: where, when and why people converse, and what they talk about. There are countries and societies in which people are not allowed to converse freely due to dictatorial governments. There are communities in which people choose not to converse. Some members of the Amish community in the United States, for example, use a silent discourse, communicating through signs, symbols and action rather than words. They wish to reach a higher level of spirituality by avoiding the ambiguities and conflicts potentially caused by language and conversation. (4)As difficult as it is to generalise about conversational trends in history, let us look at a few culturally and historically distinct ways of conversing.

Socrates, a Greek philosopher of the fifth century BC, used conversation and dialogue to explore philosophical ideas. He introduced the idea that people cannot be intelligent on their own but that they need someone else to stimulate them. Two or more people talking together can discover more truth than they could do individually. We know about Socrates from the writings of one of his students, Plato, who presents him as a master of the art of speaking. Rather than lecturing, however, Socrates used conversation and―discussion to explore ideas on right and wrong, happiness, and existence. (5)This is referred to as the Socratic method, and consisted of Socrates asking his students a series of questions (to which he professed not to know the answer) in order to arrive at a conclusion. Plato's Dialogues and Symposium are evidence of how conversation was used in this context to educate and illuminate. Talk was restricted to 'serious' matters; gossip was not permitted.

In medieval Europe the tradition of courtly love was another context in which conversation was central, but used for rather a different purpose. Originating in eleventh-century France, this new concept of love consisted of a male lover courting a woman by acting as her servant, worshipping at the altar of his lady love. These relationships were both marital and extra-marital, but emphasised the secret, private nature of the love. The meetings of courtly lovers were based around conversations on love and loyalty. These conversations were highly formalised and made use of recognisable figures of speech and conventions.

The rise of the salon and the coffee-house provides a context for a different kind of conversation, one that is much less ritualised than that of Socrates or the tradition of courtly love. Seventeenth-century France saw the burgeoning of the salon: a weekly meeting of between one and two dozen men and women held in someone's home, usually presided over by a woman with a talent for drawing out the best talk in the guests, who had been invited not because they were rich but because they had interesting things to say. Many of the guests were writers, interested in the salon as a forum for conversation on interesting topics. Unlike a party, the salons were regular meetings in which men and women talked together and produced epigrams, verse, eulogies, music, games and maxims as well as conversation. Katherine Philips, who started a salon in London in the middle of the seventeenth century, described her salon as 'a Society of Friendship to which male and female members were admitted, and in which poetry, religion and the human heart were to form the subjects of discussion'. This salon had much in common with the meetings of the Bloomsbury Group, a group of writers and artists who met in a house at 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, London, on Thursday evenings at the beginning of the twentieth century.

In eighteenth-century England conversation generally became more informal. Previously it had often been a public means of displaying one's learning, and therefore made use of rhetoric, or the art of persuasion. The first coffee-house opened in 1652 and by the eighteenth century the hundreds of coffee-houses in London provided a place where men could go to discuss art, literature, politics and economics. (6)A penny admission meant the chance to converse on serious and trivial matters, drink coffee and read the newspaper. Many Londoners spent large amounts of time in the coffee-houses. This public place of discussion and conversation marked the rise of the bourgeoisie, giving the new middle class opportunities to mix with the aristocracy in the coffee-houses.

Class is a crucial factor in the history of conversation. In 1908 a doctor wrote that she doubted whether 'any real conversation between members of two classes is possible. All conversations with my patients and their friends have been of an exceedingly one-sided character...in some cases I talked, and in some cases they did, but we never took anything like equal parts'. Although conversation can be effective in establishing equality and tolerance between individuals or groups, perceived inequalities between speakers can be a barrier to communication. Social factors such as gender, race and class affect how people perceive one another, and hence how they converse.

In African-American culture the porch is an important place of conversation. People (usually men) gather on the porch of one of their homes, or of the local store, to tell stories and to converse about daily events. Here, the location of conversation is important - the porch is a transitional space between inside and outside, public and private. The porch is both a public stage and a private interior. Conversation is then both entertainment and leisure. African-American writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston writes about the porch in her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. In the town of Eatonville, Florida, the porch is the place where black folklore is preserved through story-telling and where the town's values and traditions are maintained through conversation. The female protagonist is initially talked about, excluded from the porch, and the novel is about her eventual participation in the porch talk. This is an excerpt from the opening of the novel:

It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk.... They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgement.

Late twentieth-century Western culture has seen the proliferation of types of conversation. For many people, the dinner table is no longer the focus for conversations with family and friends. New formats for conversation have arisen due to the rise of media and communication technology. Computer networks operate 'chat rooms' where subscribers can have virtual conversations with each other. As with telephone conversation, the talking partners cannot see each other, and so body language becomes irrelevant, but the rise of chat rooms has raised the possibility of the creation of new identities through conversation. When conversing with strangers whom one will most likely never meet, one can play with identity, inventing a new name, occupation, or switching gender.

A media phenomenon centred around conversation is the talk show. Shows such as The Oprah Winfrey Show and Rikki Lake enjoyed enormous popularity in the 1990s. In 1993 The Oprah Winfrey Show attracted fifteen million viewers per show, more than any news programme or soap opera. As the name suggests, the talk show works on the principle of the talking cure. The host facilitates discussion of a designated topic by interviewing guests, seeking the advice of an 'expert', and encouraging audience participation in the discussion. (7)The conversation is extended beyond the stage. Talk shows tap into the late twentieth-century interest in people's private, psychological, emotional and sexual lives, the more sensational the better! The sets of talk shows often look like living rooms to heighten the idea that the audience is voyeuristically listening in on a private conversation. Much breakfast TV follows this line - with guests and presenters lounging on settees. Like celebrity chat shows (e.g. Mrs Merton, Late Night With David Letterman), these are meant to look like natural conversations rather than staged interviews.