The Unfinished Business of Erving Goffman: From Marginalization Up Towards the Elusive Center of American Sociology.

Erving Goffman's written legacy bears on sociology as a whole, or so he argued in his Presidential Address to the American Sociological Association (Goffman, 1983). However, while being celebrated as important to the discipline, his work is also interpreted in inconsistent ways, often downplayed or marginalized, and even neglected. This paper claims that Goffman's "well known aversion to self-disclosure" (Shalin, 2013) does not justify overlooking his trajectory, from the unknown "margins" of a Canadian small town to the elusive "center" of American sociology-and much less does it justify still circulating assessments of his personality, crafted while overlooking his life experiences-and, especially, his writings.