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Introduction Goffman Through the Looking Glass: From ‘Classical’ to
DOI link for Introduction Goffman Through the Looking Glass: From ‘Classical’ to
Introduction Goffman Through the Looking Glass: From ‘Classical’ to book
Introduction Goffman Through the Looking Glass: From ‘Classical’ to
DOI link for Introduction Goffman Through the Looking Glass: From ‘Classical’ to
Introduction Goffman Through the Looking Glass: From ‘Classical’ to book
ABSTRACT
In Lewis Carroll’s famous fairytale Through the Looking-Glass, Alice, when stepping through the frame of the mirror in the nursery, leaves behind a world of quotidian and well-known everyday existence and moves into a world of wonder, amazement and adventure. The looking glass separates reality from dream, fact from fi ction, the real from illusion, and the frame of the mirror thus becomes a point of entry into a magical and dreamlike yet also quite distorted experiential dimension. The same in many ways goes for the work of Erving Goffman. His specifi c focus on the world of the everyday also constitutes a frame through which one, as reader, can step and visit a novel and spectacular yet also quite recognisable territory of colourful conceptual and quasi-theoretical insights in abundance. One can read Goffman’s many books and enter an entirely new world with a wonderful attraction and almost magical quality, while at the same time staying fi rmly within the well-known and immediately familiar. Goffman’s many books on everyday life are, however, anything but everyday. For example, by way of his masterfully concocted metaphorical cornucopia of everyday life-consisting of such metaphors as the theatre, the ritual, the game and the frame-he depicted the mundane world as if it was anything but mundane and in this roundabout way succeeded in making the apparently trivial anything but trivial. In the words of two commentators, “trivia is no longer trivial: it now becomes important” (Schwartz and Jacobs 1979:183). Whenever one starts refl ecting upon and investigating the everyday, as Goffman excelled in doing throughout his lifetime, it is transformed and even elevated in the process. And likewise, whenever one starts refl ecting on Goffman’s work-his meticulous descriptions of those almost unnoticed aspects of social life we normally take for granted but which constitute the raw material of our lives with each other-one is gradually removed from merely describing and commenting and enters a world in which the textual reading of the many fascinating facets of his work-some obvious, others hidden-takes on a life on its own. It is such textual readings of Goffman’s work that are the purpose of this book.
