Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959)

The classic “Undead text” of sociology is Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. This article argues that what helps make Presentation Undead is that its key point is obvious. Yet this is only the case after someone shows that point to you. Undead texts are ones that live in us, because reading them awakens us to what we feel we have always seen and known, but did not quite know until we read them.