DEFAMILIARIZATIONS Having It Both Ways with Erving Goffman JOHN PLOTZ 1. AWKWARD H ISTORIANS of social science from Anthony Giddens forward have ably chronicled Erving Goffman’s legacy. 1 Goffman’s resonant book titles alone hint at the Dickensian acuity of his social close-reading: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), Behavior in Public Places (1963), Interaction Ritual (1967), Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (1974), and Forms of Talk (1981). I envy newcomers the oppor- tunity to read pieces like “On Cooling the Mark Out” (1952) and “Where the Action Is” (1967) with fresh eyes. Goffman, born in 1922 in Alberta, Canada, to Ukrainian parents, attended the University of Manitoba and the University of Toronto before receiving a PhD in sociology from Chicago. His fieldwork was in the Shetlands, and Asylums: Essays on the Condition of the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (1961) and Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963) were both writ- ten after a period of ethnographic immersion at St. Elizabeth’s mental hos- pital in Washington, DC. It may help first-time readers to know that as an adolescent he had a “special aptitude for noticing details of people’s inter- personal conduct”; also that “his Chicago classmates nicknamed him ‘the little dagger’ because of his talent for the pointed personal comment. Sometimes, they felt, he never knew when to stop.” 2 For the purposes of this article, I start with one straightforward idea that, four decades ago, literary scholars singled out as a valuable resource for our own field: Goffman’s account of embarrassment. By his reading, John Plotz is Professor of English at Brandeis University. His books include The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics (2000), Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (2008), and Semi- Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens (2017) as well as a children’s book, Time and the Tapestry: A William Morris Adventure (2014). He founded the Brandeis Novel Symposium and edits the B-Sides feature in Public Books. Victorian Literature and Culture, Vol. 47, No. 2, pp. 439–448. © Cambridge University Press 2019. doi:10.1017/S1060150319000068 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150319000068 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Brandeis Library, on 28 Apr 2020 at 02:48:50, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at