Harvey Sacks -- Lectures 1964-1965: An Introduction/Memoir.

The article reports that the publication of the lectures of sociologist Harvey Sacks has been started by the journal "Human Studies," which begins a process which will eventually make publicly available all, or virtually all, of the lectures by Sacks on conversation and related topics in social science. Most of the lectures in this larger corpus were originally delivered to classes at the University of California, first to sociology classes at the University of California in Los Angeles campus, and then after 1968 to classes in the School of Social Science at the Irvine campus of the University. When he wrote papers, Sacks imposed standards of formality and precision that were extremely hard for him to meet to his own satisfaction. Most of the papers he published on his own were work-ups of lectures, for example, the paper on story-telling, the paper on puns, etc. He drafted on his own as papers he was never sufficiently satisfied with to publish. Sacks' 1964-65 lectures can be furnished two sorts of intellectual reference points, one is his own intellectual development and ones in the intellectual context around him. Several features of these landmarks in Sacks' intellectual terrain, and of the early lectures, display some of the most potent influences on his thinking at that time. These lectures, then, have more than merely historical interest as embryonic versions of later developed work. These series of lectures began a most remarkable, inventive and productive presentation of a strikingly new vision of how to study human sociality.