On doing “being ordinary”

Abstract

Usually I start the course by doing what I do in the course, without any programmatic statements and without any indication of why it should be of any interest to anybody. Now – and this may be unfair – the course will turn out to be much more severely technical than most of you could possibly be interested in, and some good percentage of people will drop out, and usually that has the consequence that they get nothing out of the class. So I decided to spend the first session telling people something that I take it could hardly not be of interest to them. Then, when they drop out, they would at least have heard what I figure would be worth the price of the course. I guess I should say that if this is not absorbing to you, you could hardly imagine how unabsorbing the rest will be. Now, in this course I will be taking stories offered in conversation and subjecting them to a type of analysis that is concerned, roughly, to see whether it is possible to subject the details of actual events to formal investigation, informatively. The gross aim of the work I am doing is to see how finely the details of actual, naturally occurring conversation can be subjected to analysis that will yield the technology of conversation.

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