Description
Book SynopsisMatt Dawson and Dmitri N. Shalin discuss Erving Manuel Goffman: Biographical Sources of Sociological Imagination on the New Books Network
Erving Goffman is the most cited American sociologist. There is no shortage of studies exploring Goffmanâs scholarship but no extant biography of Erving Goffman. The chief reason is that a man who looked behind the facades people erect to protect their private selves, zealously guarded his own backstage. This book is the first comprehensive biography of Goffman, an intellectual of Russian-Jewish descent, who turned the âœPotemkin villageâ trope into a powerful research program. The present study shows how key turns in Goffmanâs career reflected dramatic events in his family and personal history. It is based on the materials gathered in the Erving Goffman Archives, a repository curated by the author who has been collecting documents and conducting interviews with Goffmanâs relatives, colleagues, and friends. The archival work turned up documents which improve our understanding of Goffman the scholar, the teacher, and the man. The approach adopted in this investigation sheds new light on Goffmanâs scholarship which has had an enormous and continuous impact across the social sciences and humanities.
