Volume 28, Number 12 · July 16, 1981
Phew! Oops! Oof!
By Christopher Ricks
Forms of Talk
by Erving Goffman
University of Pennsylvania Press, 320 pp., $7.95 (paper)
Unruffled, the announcer said, 'She'll be performing selections from the Bach Well-tempered Caviar.' Erving Goffman's Forms of Talk, his tenth book since he published The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life in 1959, is characteristically well-tempered in its understanding of virtually every kind of ruffle and unruffle. The essays collected in it ought to prove as pleasurable to the general public as to Goffman's fellow sociologists. The chapter which marvels acutely at the announcer's equanimity is on 'Radio Talk.' Its subtitle is 'A Study of the Ways of Our Errors.' Goffman's largeness of spirit is evident not only in the happy phrase itself but in the wide application of its 'our': he doesn't just mean radio announcers, since he discusses all the ways in which their face-saving maneuvers (despite the fact that we cannot see their faces, saved or unsaved, any more than we can see the countenance which an announcer wants to keep himself in) are much the same as those of everyday, face-to-face talk.
Review, 3001 words
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