In Conversation with Jonah: Conversation Analysis, Literary Criticism and the Book of Jonah

The author analyses the various conversations that occur between the characters in the Jonah narrative and the 'conversation' that occurs between the text and its readers. The study opens with an introduction to the field of conversation analysis, with a focus on one feature of conversation analysis-that a fundamental structure in the organization of language is adjacency pairs (for example, question/answer and invitation/refusal). Person notes how complex the adjacency pairs in the Jonah n...