Join Pocket Guide to Hell for an Esquire-inspired cocktail hour examining the drama of projected personality and social life.
While the Museum’s namesakes David and Alfred Smart continued to groom their stock of Esquire readers with post-war success stories in how to live nattily amidst the theater of a bountiful middle class life, one of the twentieth century’s most influential sociologists—Erving Goffman—was completing his graduate work on the dramaturgy of projected personality and social life.
Goffman’s journey began with radio soap opera listeners and concluded with a dissertation on “interaction rituals” in island communities. His early masterpiece of sociology, “The Presentation of Self In Everyday Life” (1959) continued the rich intellectual legacy of sociology at the University of Chicago, from the Chicago School of the 1920s to the present.
This cocktail hour examines the “symbolic interactionism” and drama of debonair gentlemen, cultural capital, and projected selves. It is followed by a special screening of the documentary “Smiling Through the Apocalypse: Esquire in the 60s” (2014, dir. Tom Hayes).
Presented by the Smart Museum of Art and Pocket Guide to Hell.