Who Is Goffman's Close But Not Deep?
So far Love’s belief—that hermeneutical close readings, due to their implied humanism, may produce a depth that is neither inherent, nor necessary to a text—has been expounded, along with her affinity for sociological practices of close observation and description. To this, I would like to add her own account, from a talk given at the University of Pennsylvania, of the way Goffman’s work has informed her own. She says:
[…] in his work on social interaction and communication, Goffman focused consistently on social dynamics at the micro scale. He tended to sidestep questions of social structure and history and he didn't have much to say about psychological interiority either. Goffman didn't write about capital, race or class, except in so far as they are materialized in visible behaviour, in gestures, spacing, tone of voice, eye-contact, clothing and comportment. So I see Goffman in this work as drawing on a natural history approach adopted by many scholars in the period. Often drawing directly on practices of animal observation, this research was distinguished …show more content…
The easiest way, then, to explain the reading method Love argues for is to observe the distinction between “‘thin’ description that details all the physical components of a wink and a ‘thick’ description that offers a richer account of significance, cultural context, and layers of individual intention” (Love 380). The focus in literary analyses falls, in this case, on very minute descriptions of gestures, expressions, and actions. Any feeling or experience they might evoke needs to be suppressed, and, as already mentioned, approaching the text has to take place in a cultural void on the part of the critic—her own cultural context and the opinions and reactions it might give rise to has to be expurgated, at least
[…] in his work on social interaction and communication, Goffman focused consistently on social dynamics at the micro scale. He tended to sidestep questions of social structure and history and he didn't have much to say about psychological interiority either. Goffman didn't write about capital, race or class, except in so far as they are materialized in visible behaviour, in gestures, spacing, tone of voice, eye-contact, clothing and comportment. So I see Goffman in this work as drawing on a natural history approach adopted by many scholars in the period. Often drawing directly on practices of animal observation, this research was distinguished …show more content…
The easiest way, then, to explain the reading method Love argues for is to observe the distinction between “‘thin’ description that details all the physical components of a wink and a ‘thick’ description that offers a richer account of significance, cultural context, and layers of individual intention” (Love 380). The focus in literary analyses falls, in this case, on very minute descriptions of gestures, expressions, and actions. Any feeling or experience they might evoke needs to be suppressed, and, as already mentioned, approaching the text has to take place in a cultural void on the part of the critic—her own cultural context and the opinions and reactions it might give rise to has to be expurgated, at least