Harvey Sacks - Legacy

Legacy

Emanuel Schegloff, one of Sacks's close collaborators, colleagues and co-authors, became his literary executor. The subsequent handling of the literary estate (Nachlass, to use the academic term) has attracted some controversy.

Sacks's major work, Lectures on Conversation, is composed of edited revisions of transcribed lectures held from Spring 1964 through to 1972, and comprises about 1200 pages in a two-volume work published by Basil Blackwel in 1992. This publication project was instigated largely by David Sudnow and Gail Jefferson, colleagues and students of Sacks at Berkeley, UCLA and Irvine, and includes an introduction by Emanuel Schegloff. In her acknowledgements in these volumes, Jefferson mentioned the help of Sudnow in dealing with Sacks's literary estate. The Harvey Sacks Memorial Association, registered as a not-for-profit Association, was formed by Sudnow.

These Lectures have been important for Sacks's later influence and for the field of Conversation Analysis.

Sudnow was a follower of Alfred Schutz in phenomenology, and Harold Garfinkel in ethnomethodology. Both Sudnow and Garfinkel regard the work of Sacks as outside the ethnomethodological mainstream.