... “strangers,” “outsiders,” and “others,” the notion of stigma best describes how these characters fit into Shakespeare’s dramatic vision. As such this essay combines the sociologist Erving Goffman’s theory of stigma with the literary historian Erich Auerbach’s account of “figural realism” to establish...

..., that is, a transparent substance through which sense data pass without modification. It is a form of artistic naive realism, one built on a myth of ability as a mode of existence without qualities or traits. As Garland- Thomson (1996: 32) writes in Extraordinary Bodies (with reference to Erving Goffman s theories...

... person. The contrasting and often contradictory positions of scholars such as Max Weber, Norbert Elias, Harold Garfinkel, Erving Goffman, Pierre Bourdieu, historians of the Annales School, Michael de Certeau, Clifford Geertz, Anthony Giddens and many others are united...