ABSTRACT
Erving Goffman was a stylist. His writing had a very characteristic voice. Berman M. enters some very strong claims concerning Goffman's writing, suggesting that he was outstandingly able to convey the conditions of everyday life in contemporary society. One of the commonplace observations to be made about Goffman's texts is that their persuasive power does not usually rest on conventional canons of scholarly self-presentation. Goffman's work resists translation into an overarching set of theoretical precepts or propositions. In the case of neither Sigmund Freud nor Goffman should the absence of an explicit 'theoretical' apparatus be seen as a lack of omission. In both authors, the style is a direct embodiment of their subject-matter. Old MacDonald is an excellent metaphor for Goffman's work in general. The repetition song parallels precisely the proliferation of exemplars and concepts, through the play of semiosis and the stylistic elaboration of his key metaphors and models.
