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

by Thomas Hood, Dwight Van De Vate

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.

336 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 10, 2017

About the author

Thomas Hood was an English poet, author and humourist, best known for poems such as The Bridge of Sighs and The Song of the Shirt. Hood wrote regularly for The London Magazine, the Athenaeum, and Punch. He later published a magazine largely consisting of his own works. Hood, never robust, lapsed into invalidism by the age of 41 and died at the age of 45. William Michael Rossetti in 1903 called him "the finest English poet" between the generations of Shelley and Tennyson. Hood was the father of playwright and humorist Tom Hood (1835 – 1874).

Reviews

[Tara Brabazon · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is OK. It is incomplete and odd, caused because it was transposed from a series of lectures and seminars and into chapters. This is theory-lite research. It presents some contextual understanding of Goffman's work, but this is a very limited rendering of sociology.