The Goffman Lectures: Philosophical and Sociological Essays About the Writings of Erving Goffman

by Thomas Hood, Dwight Van De Vate

Overview

This book consists of essays presented as lectures to undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The context was a special class during which students were reading the published work of Erving Goffman and writing about what they were reading. Some students enrolled as philosophy students and others as sociology students. Professor Hood and Professor Van De Vate often handed out printed versions to the students on the day they were presented. Dr. Hood took these printed versions to prepare the manuscript in a continuous form. The lectures themselves were presented some years apart, since the two departments agreed to offer the course only occasionally. The essays were designed to stimulate questions about what Goffman concludes, as well his techniques of observing and analyzing social life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781524572679
Publisher:	Xlibris Corporation
Publication date:	01/10/2017
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

Editorial Reviews

2019-02-05

A debut volume of criticism introduces readers to the legacy of Erving Goffman.

Goffman was one of the most influential sociologists of the 20th century, making significant contributions to the study of the individual, society, and the intersection of the two. In these lectures, originally delivered as part of a class offered at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, professors Hood and Van de Vate track Goffman's ideas over the course of his major works, including The Presentation ofSelf in Everyday Life, Stigma, Strategic Interaction, and others. Beginning with the premise that Goffman "is trying to frame general laws about the behavior of human beings in our society," the authors attempt to define the notions of sociology, society, the human being, and identity, then proceed to Goffmanian explanations of social behavior, self-knowledge, and identity games that create an illusion of reality. The second half of the book supplies an extensive exploration of Frame Analysis, which the authors believe to be "Goffman's most complete work." Poorly received at the time of its publication, the volume details how an individual's perception of society is organized by conceptual "frames," some of them social and some of them natural. The authors elucidate Goffman's importance in the hopes of presenting him to a new generation of students seeking to understand the views of one of sociology's greatest innovators. The book is structured so that each section is authored by either Hood or Van de Vate, though each writes in the same dense academic style that makes heavy use of quotations and specialized language. They have produced an undeniably thorough primer for those getting into Goffman. That said, the work assumes the reader has some background in the study of sociology (enough to know what the dramaturgical perspective is, for example) and the way academic arguments are constructed. General readers should be wary, but anyone looking for a deeper dissection of framing analysis should find much of interest here.

A dense but comprehensive investigation into the concepts of a leading sociologist.

Kirkus Reviews