Erving Goffman

Number Of Volumes: 4
Gary Alan Fine - Northwestern University, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice
Gregory W H Smith - University of Salford, UK
SAGE Masters in Modern Social Thought Series
Erving Goffman
1688 pages | Sage UK
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Description

Erving Goffman (1922-82) was an inspirational thinker, and one of the giants of 20th century sociology. Several of his books, notably The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Asylums (1961), Relations in Public (1963), Stigma (1963) and Gender Advertisements (1979) are acknowledged as modern classics. Goffman fundamentally revised how we think of social life. After him, the study of social encounters, behavior in public, the construction and deconstruction of the self, stigma and forms of everyday communication, were never the same again.

Without being obviously attached to any discrete research tradition, Goffman drew from the best thought on social interaction, applied it in his fieldwork, and produced a richly satisfying and extraordinarily influential approach to making sense of social life. He was a sociological virtuoso, producing unmatched insights into how life with others is sustained and why forms of interaction break down or cause personal damage.

This unparalleled collection, edited by two acknowledged international experts on Goffman, produces a unique reference resource for researchers and students. It consists of the main critical responses to Goffman's oeuvre, offering readers a distillation of the main themes in Goffman's work and explaining how these themes relate to contemporary social thought. The collection is systematic and constitutes a unique asset in understanding this searching and wide-ranging thinker.

The four volumes are thematically organized into nine sections:

Section 1: Personal Reminiscences

Goffman became internationally famous during the 1960s and 70s, at a moment when American sociology was growing by leaps and bounds. Although in some ways, an unusually reticent man, Goffman's success made him one of the `faces' of American sociology during these crucial years in the professional formation of the subject. Because Goffman's methods of analysis are so personal to the man himself, this section is a particularly useful guide to elucidating and applying Goffman's ideas.

Section 2: Biography and Career

In this section Goffman's career is systematically and critically presented. Included are reflections on Goffman's relation to the academic community, his central legacies and his highly daring and revisionist attempt to rethink social encounters and social life.

Section 3: Goffman's Sociology & Modern Society

Although Goffman produced one of the most significant and influential of all contemporary approaches to sociology, the application of his ideas to the central questions of the day is often hard to identify. He was never an overtly `political' thinker, nor did he engage in utopian theorizing. In this section, the relevance of Goffman's ideas for understanding modern society is pinpointed. Included are considerations of his dramaturgical method, his place in the politics of 60s Sociology, the relation of his ideas to questions of civility and etiquette and a discussion of how Goffman viewed human nature.

Section 4: Methods

Towards the end of his life Goffman sought to externalize the main methodological themes in his work. These had been mainly implicit in his popular writings in the late 1950s and 60s. However, in books like Forms of Talk (1981) and Frame Analysis (1986) he began to be more concrete about the key methodological elements in his work. This section includes discussions of Goffman's use of the concept of self, outlines the distinctive features of his method and indicates how his thought relates to `common sense'.

Section 5: Textuality

This section continues the theme of Goffman's methodology, by examining how he understood and applied forms of `reading' society and, in turn, how his readings have been `read'. The challenge his work poses to orthodox ethnography, the place of irony in his analysis, the virtuoso character of his sociology and Goffman's innovations and decoding interaction comprise the central themes of this section.

Section 6: Central Sociological Concerns

In this, the most lengthy section of the collection, Goffman's central sociological concerns are investigated. His work on interaction, self, frames, stigma, mental illness and total institutions is critically examined. The section reveals the amazing fertility of Goffman's insights and the astonishing range of his sociological imagination. Above all, a critical understanding of why Goffman is important for sociology, what his achievement constitutes, and the strengths and limitations of his sociology, emerges from these pages.

Section 7: Goffman and the Classical Tradition

Goffman's relation to the classical tradition is explored in this section. Comparisons with the ideas of Cooley, Simmel, Park, Hughes and the Chicago School are identified and elaborated. The section helps readers to understand the nature of the unusual crucible from which Goffman's approach emerged.

Section 8: Goffman and His Contemporaries

Goffman's ideas generated a huge amount of critical discussion in his own lifetime. This section provides readers with a comprehensive guide to Goffman's relationship to the work of Blumer, structuralism, existentialism, Sartre, Elias, Habermas and feminism. Again, the sheer range of Goffman's influence emerges most powerfully.

Section 9: Goffman's Influence on Successors

Although Goffman died in 1982, his work is still a major influence in contemporary social analysis. This section explains how Goffman's ideas have been used in contemporary work on conversation analysis, semiotics, consumer culture, postmodernism and the public sphere.

This magisterial collection is a fitting critical tribute to the sociology of Erving Goffman. It enables readers to fully appreciate the achievement and originality of this seminal thinker.

Contents

Introduction

Introduction

PART ONE: PERSONAL REMINISCENCES

  • Erving Goffman
  • Discoverer of the Infinitely Small
  • Erving Goffman
  • A Personal Appreciation
  • Erving Goffman (1922-1982)
  • On the Importance of Being Erving
  • Erving Goffman, 1922-1982
  • On Erving Goffman
  • Role Models and Role Distance
  • A Remembrance of Erving Goffman
  • The Passing of Intellectual Generations
  • Reflections on the Death of Erving Goffman
  • The Nature of Goffman

PART TWO: BIOGRAPHY AND CAREER

  • Erving Goffman
  • His Presentation of Self
  • Erving Goffman and the Academic Community
  • Rebuttal to Oromaner Paper
  • Vicissitudes of the Sacred
  • Erving Goffman's Sociological Legacies
  • A View From the Fort
  • Erving Goffman as Canadian
  • Baltasound as the Symbolic Capital of Social Interaction
  • An Interview with Erving Goffman, 1980

PART THREE: GOFFMAN'S SOCIOLOGY AND MODERN SOCIETY

  • Erving Goffman
  • Other Symptoms of the Crisis
  • Goffman's Dramaturgy and Other New Theories
  • The Politics of Sociology
  • Gouldner, Goffman and Garfinkel
  • Weird but Brilliant Light on the Way We Live Now
  • A Fan Letter on Erving Goffman
  • Erving Goffman et le Temps du Soupcon
  • The Underworld-View of Erving Goffman
  • Two on the Aisle
  • The Decline of Civility
  • A Comment on Erving Goffman's Sociology
  • Cold Sweat
  • Embarrassment and Erving Goffman's Idea of Human Nature
  • Ethics as Etiquette
  • The Emblematic Contribution of Erving Goffman

PART FOUR: METHODS

  • Self and the Revolt Against Method
  • Resemblances
  • Understanding Goffman's Methods
  • Stating the Obvious
  • What Does Erving Goffman Really Tell Us?

PART FIVE: TEXTUALITY

  • An Appreciation of Sociological Tropes
  • A Tribute to Erving Goffman
  • Sociology, Rhetoric and Personal Communication
  • Goffman's Poetics
  • A Partisan View
  • Sarcasm, Satire, and Irony as Voices in Erving Goffman's Asylums
  • Erving Goffman
  • Writing the End of Ethnography
  • Autonomy and Credibility
  • Voice as Method
  • Reading Goffman on Interaction

PART SIX: CENTRAL SOCIOLOGICAL CONCERNS

  • INTERACTION
  • Life as Theater
  • Some Notes on the Dramaturgic Approach to Social Reality
  • Opening Encounters
  • Couple Tie-Signs and Interpersonal Threat
  • A Field Experiment
  • The Interaction Order Sui Generis
  • Goffman's Contribution to Social Theory
  • Analyzing Gender in Public Places
  • Rethinking Goffman's Vision of Everyday Life
  • Goffman's Attitude and Social Analysis
  • Goffman and Interactional Citizenship
  • Self
  • Spontaneous Involvement and Social Life
  • The Self as Work of Art
  • Maximising, Moralising and Dramatising
  • Character is the Fundamental Illusion
  • Goffman, Positivism and the Self
  • Strangers to Themeselves
  • How Interactants are Other than They Are
  • Is the Presented Self Sincere?
  • Goffman, Impression Management and the Postmodern Self
  • Toward a Sociology of the Person
  • FRAMES
  • On Goffman's Frame Analysis
  • Frame Analysis of Plea Bargaining
  • Negative and Positive Keying in Natural Contexts
  • Preserving the Transformation Concept From Death Through Conflation
  • Frame Paralysis
  • When Time Stands Still
  • Incidents, Accidents, Failures
  • The Representation of Negative Experience in Public Entertainment
  • Reading Goffman's Framing as Provocation of a Discipline
  • Stigma, Mental Illness and Total Institutions
  • Miriam Siegler and Humphrey Osmond
  • Goffman's Model of Mental Illness
  • The Two Cultures and the Total Institution
  • <i>Asylums</i> Revisited
  • Psycho-Medical Dualism
  • The Case of Erving Goffman
  • Goffman, Interactionism, and the Management of Stigma in Everyday Life
  • Goffman's Concept of the Total Institution
  • Criticisms and Revisions
  • <i>Goffman's Asylums</i> and the Social Control of the Mentally Ill
  • Goffman's <i>Asylums</i> and the Total Institution Model of Mental Hospitals

PART SEVEN: GOFFMAN AND THE CLASSICAL TRADITION

  • Erving Goffman and the Development of Modern Social Theory
  • The Degradation of the Sacred
  • Approaches of Cooley and Goffman
  • Snapshots `Sub Specie Aeternitatis'
  • Simmel, Goffman and Formal Sociology
  • Park, Doyle and Hughes
  • Neglected Antecedents of Goffman's Theory of Ceremony
  • Georg Simmel and Erving Goffman
  • Legitimators of the Sociological Investigation of Human Experience

PART EIGHT: GOFFMAN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES

  • Action vs. Interaction
  • <i>Relations in Public - Microstudies of the Public Order</i> by Erving Goffman
  • Essential Features of Face-to-Face Interaction
  • `Situation' vs `Frame'
  • The `Interactionist' and the `Structuralist' Analyses of Everyday Life
  • Sincerity and Politics
  • `Existentialists' vs Goffman and Proust
  • Frame Analysis Reconsidered
  • A Reply to Denzin and Keller
  • L'Enfer, c'est les Autres
  • Goffman's Sartrism'
  • Goffman as a Systematic Social Theorist
  • Goffman and the Analysis of Conversation
  • Ritual Talk
  • Embarrasment and Civilization
  • On Some Similarities and Differences in the Work of Goffman and Elias
  • Habermas, Goffman, and Communicative Action
  • Implications for Professional Practice
  • Goffman in Feminist Perspective

PART NINE: GOFFMAN'S INFLUENCES ON SUCCESSORS

  • Erving Goffman's Sociology as a Semiotics of Postmodern Culture
  • Alienation and Everyday Life
  • Goffman Meets Marx at the Shopping Mall
  • The Linguistic Realization of Face Management
  • Implications for Language Production and Comprehension, Person Perception, and Cross-Cultural Communication
  • Goffman Against Postmodernism
  • Emotion and the Reality of the Self
  • Following Goffman, Following Durkheim into the Public Realm

Description

Erving Goffman (1922-82) was an inspirational thinker, and one of the giants of 20th century sociology. Several of his books, notably The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Asylums (1961), Relations in Public (1963), Stigma (1963) and Gender Advertisements (1979) are acknowledged as modern classics. Goffman fundamentally revised how we think of social life. After him, the study of social encounters, behavior in public, the construction and deconstruction of the self, stigma and forms of everyday communication, were never the same again.

Without being obviously attached to any discrete research tradition, Goffman drew from the best thought on social interaction, applied it in his fieldwork, and produced a richly satisfying and extraordinarily influential approach to making sense of social life. He was a sociological virtuoso, producing unmatched insights into how life with others is sustained and why forms of interaction break down or cause personal damage.

This unparalleled collection, edited by two acknowledged international experts on Goffman, produces a unique reference resource for researchers and students. It consists of the main critical responses to Goffman's oeuvre, offering readers a distillation of the main themes in Goffman's work and explaining how these themes relate to contemporary social thought. The collection is systematic and constitutes a unique asset in understanding this searching and wide-ranging thinker.

The four volumes are thematically organized into nine sections:

Section 1: Personal Reminiscences

Goffman became internationally famous during the 1960s and 70s, at a moment when American sociology was growing by leaps and bounds. Although in some ways, an unusually reticent man, Goffman's success made him one of the `faces' of American sociology during these crucial years in the professional formation of the subject. Because Goffman's methods of analysis are so personal to the man himself, this section is a particularly useful guide to elucidating and applying Goffman's ideas.

Section 2: Biography and Career

In this section Goffman's career is systematically and critically presented. Included are reflections on Goffman's relation to the academic community, his central legacies and his highly daring and revisionist attempt to rethink social encounters and social life.

Section 3: Goffman's Sociology & Modern Society

Although Goffman produced one of the most significant and influential of all contemporary approaches to sociology, the application of his ideas to the central questions of the day is often hard to identify. He was never an overtly `political' thinker, nor did he engage in utopian theorizing. In this section, the relevance of Goffman's ideas for understanding modern society is pinpointed. Included are considerations of his dramaturgical method, his place in the politics of 60s Sociology, the relation of his ideas to questions of civility and etiquette and a discussion of how Goffman viewed human nature.

Section 4: Methods

Towards the end of his life Goffman sought to externalize the main methodological themes in his work. These had been mainly implicit in his popular writings in the late 1950s and 60s. However, in books like Forms of Talk (1981) and Frame Analysis (1986) he began to be more concrete about the key methodological elements in his work. This section includes discussions of Goffman's use of the concept of self, outlines the distinctive features of his method and indicates how his thought relates to `common sense'.

Section 5: Textuality

This section continues the theme of Goffman's methodology, by examining how he understood and applied forms of `reading' society and, in turn, how his readings have been `read'. The challenge his work poses to orthodox ethnography, the place of irony in his analysis, the virtuoso character of his sociology and Goffman's innovations and decoding interaction comprise the central themes of this section.

Section 6: Central Sociological Concerns

In this, the most lengthy section of the collection, Goffman's central sociological concerns are investigated. His work on interaction, self, frames, stigma, mental illness and total institutions is critically examined. The section reveals the amazing fertility of Goffman's insights and the astonishing range of his sociological imagination. Above all, a critical understanding of why Goffman is important for sociology, what his achievement constitutes, and the strengths and limitations of his sociology, emerges from these pages.

Section 7: Goffman and the Classical Tradition

Goffman's relation to the classical tradition is explored in this section. Comparisons with the ideas of Cooley, Simmel, Park, Hughes and the Chicago School are identified and elaborated. The section helps readers to understand the nature of the unusual crucible from which Goffman's approach emerged.

Section 8: Goffman and His Contemporaries

Goffman's ideas generated a huge amount of critical discussion in his own lifetime. This section provides readers with a comprehensive guide to Goffman's relationship to the work of Blumer, structuralism, existentialism, Sartre, Elias, Habermas and feminism. Again, the sheer range of Goffman's influence emerges most powerfully.

Section 9: Goffman's Influence on Successors

Although Goffman died in 1982, his work is still a major influence in contemporary social analysis. This section explains how Goffman's ideas have been used in contemporary work on conversation analysis, semiotics, consumer culture, postmodernism and the public sphere.

This magisterial collection is a fitting critical tribute to the sociology of Erving Goffman. It enables readers to fully appreciate the achievement and originality of this seminal thinker.

Contents

Introduction

Introduction

PART ONE: PERSONAL REMINISCENCES

  • Erving Goffman
  • Discoverer of the Infinitely Small
  • Erving Goffman
  • A Personal Appreciation
  • Erving Goffman (1922-1982)
  • On the Importance of Being Erving
  • Erving Goffman, 1922-1982
  • On Erving Goffman
  • Role Models and Role Distance
  • A Remembrance of Erving Goffman
  • The Passing of Intellectual Generations
  • Reflections on the Death of Erving Goffman
  • The Nature of Goffman

PART TWO: BIOGRAPHY AND CAREER

  • Erving Goffman
  • His Presentation of Self
  • Erving Goffman and the Academic Community
  • Rebuttal to Oromaner Paper
  • Vicissitudes of the Sacred
  • Erving Goffman's Sociological Legacies
  • A View From the Fort
  • Erving Goffman as Canadian
  • Baltasound as the Symbolic Capital of Social Interaction
  • An Interview with Erving Goffman, 1980

PART THREE: GOFFMAN'S SOCIOLOGY AND MODERN SOCIETY

  • Erving Goffman
  • Other Symptoms of the Crisis
  • Goffman's Dramaturgy and Other New Theories
  • The Politics of Sociology
  • Gouldner, Goffman and Garfinkel
  • Weird but Brilliant Light on the Way We Live Now
  • A Fan Letter on Erving Goffman
  • Erving Goffman et le Temps du Soupcon
  • The Underworld-View of Erving Goffman
  • Two on the Aisle
  • The Decline of Civility
  • A Comment on Erving Goffman's Sociology
  • Cold Sweat
  • Embarrassment and Erving Goffman's Idea of Human Nature
  • Ethics as Etiquette
  • The Emblematic Contribution of Erving Goffman

PART FOUR: METHODS

  • Self and the Revolt Against Method
  • Resemblances
  • Understanding Goffman's Methods
  • Stating the Obvious
  • What Does Erving Goffman Really Tell Us?

PART FIVE: TEXTUALITY

  • An Appreciation of Sociological Tropes
  • A Tribute to Erving Goffman
  • Sociology, Rhetoric and Personal Communication
  • Goffman's Poetics
  • A Partisan View
  • Sarcasm, Satire, and Irony as Voices in Erving Goffman's Asylums
  • Erving Goffman
  • Writing the End of Ethnography
  • Autonomy and Credibility
  • Voice as Method
  • Reading Goffman on Interaction

PART SIX: CENTRAL SOCIOLOGICAL CONCERNS

  • INTERACTION
  • Life as Theater
  • Some Notes on the Dramaturgic Approach to Social Reality
  • Opening Encounters
  • Couple Tie-Signs and Interpersonal Threat
  • A Field Experiment
  • The Interaction Order Sui Generis
  • Goffman's Contribution to Social Theory
  • Analyzing Gender in Public Places
  • Rethinking Goffman's Vision of Everyday Life
  • Goffman's Attitude and Social Analysis
  • Goffman and Interactional Citizenship
  • Self
  • Spontaneous Involvement and Social Life
  • The Self as Work of Art
  • Maximising, Moralising and Dramatising
  • Character is the Fundamental Illusion
  • Goffman, Positivism and the Self
  • Strangers to Themeselves
  • How Interactants are Other than They Are
  • Is the Presented Self Sincere?
  • Goffman, Impression Management and the Postmodern Self
  • Toward a Sociology of the Person
  • FRAMES
  • On Goffman's Frame Analysis
  • Frame Analysis of Plea Bargaining
  • Negative and Positive Keying in Natural Contexts
  • Preserving the Transformation Concept From Death Through Conflation
  • Frame Paralysis
  • When Time Stands Still
  • Incidents, Accidents, Failures
  • The Representation of Negative Experience in Public Entertainment
  • Reading Goffman's Framing as Provocation of a Discipline
  • Stigma, Mental Illness and Total Institutions
  • Miriam Siegler and Humphrey Osmond
  • Goffman's Model of Mental Illness
  • The Two Cultures and the Total Institution
  • <i>Asylums</i> Revisited
  • Psycho-Medical Dualism
  • The Case of Erving Goffman
  • Goffman, Interactionism, and the Management of Stigma in Everyday Life
  • Goffman's Concept of the Total Institution
  • Criticisms and Revisions
  • <i>Goffman's Asylums</i> and the Social Control of the Mentally Ill
  • Goffman's <i>Asylums</i> and the Total Institution Model of Mental Hospitals

PART SEVEN: GOFFMAN AND THE CLASSICAL TRADITION

  • Erving Goffman and the Development of Modern Social Theory
  • The Degradation of the Sacred
  • Approaches of Cooley and Goffman
  • Snapshots `Sub Specie Aeternitatis'
  • Simmel, Goffman and Formal Sociology
  • Park, Doyle and Hughes
  • Neglected Antecedents of Goffman's Theory of Ceremony
  • Georg Simmel and Erving Goffman
  • Legitimators of the Sociological Investigation of Human Experience

PART EIGHT: GOFFMAN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES

  • Action vs. Interaction
  • <i>Relations in Public - Microstudies of the Public Order</i> by Erving Goffman
  • Essential Features of Face-to-Face Interaction
  • `Situation' vs `Frame'
  • The `Interactionist' and the `Structuralist' Analyses of Everyday Life
  • Sincerity and Politics
  • `Existentialists' vs Goffman and Proust
  • Frame Analysis Reconsidered
  • A Reply to Denzin and Keller
  • L'Enfer, c'est les Autres
  • Goffman's Sartrism'
  • Goffman as a Systematic Social Theorist
  • Goffman and the Analysis of Conversation
  • Ritual Talk
  • Embarrasment and Civilization
  • On Some Similarities and Differences in the Work of Goffman and Elias
  • Habermas, Goffman, and Communicative Action
  • Implications for Professional Practice
  • Goffman in Feminist Perspective

PART NINE: GOFFMAN'S INFLUENCES ON SUCCESSORS

  • Erving Goffman's Sociology as a Semiotics of Postmodern Culture
  • Alienation and Everyday Life
  • Goffman Meets Marx at the Shopping Mall
  • The Linguistic Realization of Face Management
  • Implications for Language Production and Comprehension, Person Perception, and Cross-Cultural Communication
  • Goffman Against Postmodernism
  • Emotion and the Reality of the Self
  • Following Goffman, Following Durkheim into the Public Realm

1688 pages | Sage UK

Format Published Date ISBN Price

Erving Goffman (1922-82) was an inspirational thinker, and one of the giants of 20th century sociology. Several of his books, notably The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Asylums (1961), Relations in Public (1963), Stigma (1963) and Gender Advertisements (1979) are acknowledged as modern classics. Goffman fundamentally revised how we think of social life. After him, the study of social encounters, behavior in public, the construction and deconstruction of the self, stigma and forms of everyday communication, were never the same again.

Without being obviously attached to any discrete research tradition, Goffman drew from the best thought on social interaction, applied it in his fieldwork, and produced a richly satisfying and extraordinarily influential approach to making sense of social life. He was a sociological virtuoso, producing unmatched insights into how life with others is sustained and why forms of interaction break down or cause personal damage.

This unparalleled collection, edited by two acknowledged international experts on Goffman, produces a unique reference resource for researchers and students. It consists of the main critical responses to Goffman's oeuvre, offering readers a distillation of the main themes in Goffman's work and explaining how these themes relate to contemporary social thought. The collection is systematic and constitutes a unique asset in understanding this searching and wide-ranging thinker.

The four volumes are thematically organized into nine sections:

Section 1: Personal Reminiscences

Goffman became internationally famous during the 1960s and 70s, at a moment when American sociology was growing by leaps and bounds. Although in some ways, an unusually reticent man, Goffman's success made him one of the `faces' of American sociology during these crucial years in the professional formation of the subject. Because Goffman's methods of analysis are so personal to the man himself, this section is a particularly useful guide to elucidating and applying Goffman's ideas.

Section 2: Biography and Career

In this section Goffman's career is systematically and critically presented. Included are reflections on Goffman's relation to the academic community, his central legacies and his highly daring and revisionist attempt to rethink social encounters and social life.

Section 3: Goffman's Sociology & Modern Society

Although Goffman produced one of the most significant and influential of all contemporary approaches to sociology, the application of his ideas to the central questions of the day is often hard to identify. He was never an overtly `political' thinker, nor did he engage in utopian theorizing. In this section, the relevance of Goffman's ideas for understanding modern society is pinpointed. Included are considerations of his dramaturgical method, his place in the politics of 60s Sociology, the relation of his ideas to questions of civility and etiquette and a discussion of how Goffman viewed human nature.

Section 4: Methods

Towards the end of his life Goffman sought to externalize the main methodological themes in his work. These had been mainly implicit in his popular writings in the late 1950s and 60s. However, in books like Forms of Talk (1981) and Frame Analysis (1986) he began to be more concrete about the key methodological elements in his work. This section includes discussions of Goffman's use of the concept of self, outlines the distinctive features of his method and indicates how his thought relates to `common sense'.

Section 5: Textuality

This section continues the theme of Goffman's methodology, by examining how he understood and applied forms of `reading' society and, in turn, how his readings have been `read'. The challenge his work poses to orthodox ethnography, the place of irony in his analysis, the virtuoso character of his sociology and Goffman's innovations and decoding interaction comprise the central themes of this section.

Section 6: Central Sociological Concerns

In this, the most lengthy section of the collection, Goffman's central sociological concerns are investigated. His work on interaction, self, frames, stigma, mental illness and total institutions is critically examined. The section reveals the amazing fertility of Goffman's insights and the astonishing range of his sociological imagination. Above all, a critical understanding of why Goffman is important for sociology, what his achievement constitutes, and the strengths and limitations of his sociology, emerges from these pages.

Section 7: Goffman and the Classical Tradition

Goffman's relation to the classical tradition is explored in this section. Comparisons with the ideas of Cooley, Simmel, Park, Hughes and the Chicago School are identified and elaborated. The section helps readers to understand the nature of the unusual crucible from which Goffman's approach emerged.

Section 8: Goffman and His Contemporaries

Goffman's ideas generated a huge amount of critical discussion in his own lifetime. This section provides readers with a comprehensive guide to Goffman's relationship to the work of Blumer, structuralism, existentialism, Sartre, Elias, Habermas and feminism. Again, the sheer range of Goffman's influence emerges most powerfully.

Section 9: Goffman's Influence on Successors

Although Goffman died in 1982, his work is still a major influence in contemporary social analysis. This section explains how Goffman's ideas have been used in contemporary work on conversation analysis, semiotics, consumer culture, postmodernism and the public sphere.

This magisterial collection is a fitting critical tribute to the sociology of Erving Goffman. It enables readers to fully appreciate the achievement and originality of this seminal thinker.


Table Of Contents:

  • Introduction
  • PART ONE: PERSONAL REMINISCENCES
  • Erving Goffman
  • Discoverer of the Infinitely Small
  • Erving Goffman
  • A Personal Appreciation
  • Erving Goffman (1922-1982)
  • On the Importance of Being Erving
  • Erving Goffman, 1922-1982
  • On Erving Goffman
  • Role Models and Role Distance
  • A Remembrance of Erving Goffman
  • The Passing of Intellectual Generations
  • Reflections on the Death of Erving Goffman
  • The Nature of Goffman
  • PART TWO: BIOGRAPHY AND CAREER
  • Erving Goffman
  • His Presentation of Self
  • Erving Goffman and the Academic Community
  • Rebuttal to Oromaner Paper
  • Vicissitudes of the Sacred
  • Erving Goffman's Sociological Legacies
  • A View From the Fort
  • Erving Goffman as Canadian
  • Baltasound as the Symbolic Capital of Social Interaction
  • An Interview with Erving Goffman, 1980
  • PART THREE: GOFFMAN'S SOCIOLOGY AND MODERN SOCIETY
  • Erving Goffman
  • Other Symptoms of the Crisis
  • Goffman's Dramaturgy and Other New Theories
  • The Politics of Sociology
  • Gouldner, Goffman and Garfinkel
  • Weird but Brilliant Light on the Way We Live Now
  • A Fan Letter on Erving Goffman
  • Erving Goffman et le Temps du Soupcon
  • The Underworld-View of Erving Goffman
  • Two on the Aisle
  • The Decline of Civility
  • A Comment on Erving Goffman's Sociology
  • Cold Sweat
  • Embarrassment and Erving Goffman's Idea of Human Nature
  • Ethics as Etiquette
  • The Emblematic Contribution of Erving Goffman
  • PART FOUR: METHODS
  • Self and the Revolt Against Method
  • Resemblances
  • Understanding Goffman's Methods
  • Stating the Obvious
  • What Does Erving Goffman Really Tell Us?
  • PART FIVE: TEXTUALITY
  • An Appreciation of Sociological Tropes
  • A Tribute to Erving Goffman
  • Sociology, Rhetoric and Personal Communication
  • Goffman's Poetics
  • A Partisan View
  • Sarcasm, Satire, and Irony as Voices in Erving Goffman's Asylums
  • Erving Goffman
  • Writing the End of Ethnography
  • Autonomy and Credibility
  • Voice as Method
  • Reading Goffman on Interaction
  • PART SIX: CENTRAL SOCIOLOGICAL CONCERNS
  • INTERACTION
  • Life as Theater
  • Some Notes on the Dramaturgic Approach to Social Reality
  • Opening Encounters
  • Couple Tie-Signs and Interpersonal Threat
  • A Field Experiment
  • The Interaction Order Sui Generis
  • Goffman's Contribution to Social Theory
  • Analyzing Gender in Public Places
  • Rethinking Goffman's Vision of Everyday Life
  • Goffman's Attitude and Social Analysis
  • Goffman and Interactional Citizenship
  • Self
  • Spontaneous Involvement and Social Life
  • The Self as Work of Art
  • Maximising, Moralising and Dramatising
  • Character is the Fundamental Illusion
  • Goffman, Positivism and the Self
  • Strangers to Themeselves
  • How Interactants are Other than They Are
  • Is the Presented Self Sincere?
  • Goffman, Impression Management and the Postmodern Self
  • Toward a Sociology of the Person
  • FRAMES
  • On Goffman's Frame Analysis
  • Frame Analysis of Plea Bargaining
  • Negative and Positive Keying in Natural Contexts
  • Preserving the Transformation Concept From Death Through Conflation
  • Frame Paralysis
  • When Time Stands Still
  • Incidents, Accidents, Failures
  • The Representation of Negative Experience in Public Entertainment
  • Reading Goffman's Framing as Provocation of a Discipline
  • Stigma, Mental Illness and Total Institutions
  • Miriam Siegler and Humphrey Osmond
  • Goffman's Model of Mental Illness
  • The Two Cultures and the Total Institution
  • <i>Asylums</i> Revisited
  • Psycho-Medical Dualism
  • The Case of Erving Goffman
  • Goffman, Interactionism, and the Management of Stigma in Everyday Life
  • Goffman's Concept of the Total Institution
  • Criticisms and Revisions
  • <i>Goffman's Asylums</i> and the Social Control of the Mentally Ill
  • Goffman's <i>Asylums</i> and the Total Institution Model of Mental Hospitals
  • PART SEVEN: GOFFMAN AND THE CLASSICAL TRADITION
  • Erving Goffman and the Development of Modern Social Theory
  • The Degradation of the Sacred
  • Approaches of Cooley and Goffman
  • Snapshots `Sub Specie Aeternitatis'
  • Simmel, Goffman and Formal Sociology
  • Park, Doyle and Hughes
  • Neglected Antecedents of Goffman's Theory of Ceremony
  • Georg Simmel and Erving Goffman
  • Legitimators of the Sociological Investigation of Human Experience
  • PART EIGHT: GOFFMAN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES
  • Action vs. Interaction
  • <i>Relations in Public - Microstudies of the Public Order</i> by Erving Goffman
  • Essential Features of Face-to-Face Interaction
  • `Situation' vs `Frame'
  • The `Interactionist' and the `Structuralist' Analyses of Everyday Life
  • Sincerity and Politics
  • `Existentialists' vs Goffman and Proust
  • Frame Analysis Reconsidered
  • A Reply to Denzin and Keller
  • L'Enfer, c'est les Autres
  • Goffman's Sartrism'
  • Goffman as a Systematic Social Theorist
  • Goffman and the Analysis of Conversation
  • Ritual Talk
  • Embarrasment and Civilization
  • On Some Similarities and Differences in the Work of Goffman and Elias
  • Habermas, Goffman, and Communicative Action
  • Implications for Professional Practice
  • Goffman in Feminist Perspective
  • PART NINE: GOFFMAN'S INFLUENCES ON SUCCESSORS
  • Erving Goffman's Sociology as a Semiotics of Postmodern Culture
  • Alienation and Everyday Life
  • Goffman Meets Marx at the Shopping Mall
  • The Linguistic Realization of Face Management
  • Implications for Language Production and Comprehension, Person Perception, and Cross-Cultural Communication
  • Goffman Against Postmodernism
  • Emotion and the Reality of the Self
  • Following Goffman, Following Durkheim into the Public Realm

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