Goffman The Insanity Of Place Analysis

One does not have to read closely but continuously from beginning to end, with sustain attention; a kind of thin and flat reading that rejects the traditional humanist categories of depth, experience, motivation and experience in favor of close attention of human subjects and observation to description rather than interpretations.
To substantiate her purpose Love presents a justified illustration from Goffman’s The Insanity of Place. In his work Goffman states that sociological imagination can feed on personal experience, which leads to systematic inquiry into the interplay between our professional and everyday life. Thus this example supports the hypothesis that identity should be understood as an affect rather than a cause in such interactions such as mental asylums. He does not allude to the facts of race, class, gender or sex but rather to extreme differences in habitual behavior.
“Goffman has also been associated with the tradition of symbolic interactionism founded by Herbert Blumer…” (Love 378)
Here Heather Love’s predominant observation is defined in the words of Latour- the real world and the truths are not identical. The gained truths are all right there on the surface, in multiple forms that has to be re described. Thus, our description must be close but not closed, always open to depth. The concept of ‘frame analyses depict the true relation between the real world and the truths. A person uses a frame (which represents a structure) to hold together a picture (which represents the context) of what he is experiencing in his life. When Love asserts that “deep” reading and textual richness serve as carriers for an allegedly supernatural humanism she points towards bourgeois humanism supposedly propped up by Raymond Willi...

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...hy and Goffman’s neutral portraits of social interactions. The call for ‘flat’ description in Literary Studies, the scholars have tend to focus on the need to suspend routine activities of unveiling and demystification, to train oneself out of habits of paranoia and suspicion. As Edwrad Soja in History: geography: modernity, The Cultural Studies Reader states that a concept becomes more clear and lucid when you look up for its geographical, historical and other perspectives of understanding as well. Love states that depth is also a dimension that critics attempt to produce in their readings, by attributing life, richness, warmth and voice of text. A turn from interpretation to description might be one way to give up that ghost of traditional historical and ethical rigidities, but who among us is willing to exchange the fat and the living for the thin and the dead?