The Personal in the Political Biography (original) (raw)
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Prepublication of the introductory article of an issue of _Cercles, revue pluridisciplinaire d'études anglophones_. The biographical turn, as we find convenient to call the renewed interest in biography and biographic approaches that has been taking place over the last decades, converging from several disciplines of the humanities, appears like a paradigmatic debate of sorts, that both calls for a new definition of biography in the larger sense of the term, and generates a theoretical demand.This article positions biographical studies within the perimeter of life-writing considered as an emerging crossroads discipline in the humanities. It analyses some of the causes of the so-called "resistance to theory" of biography. It argues that the very reappraisal of the central concept of the subject operated by the philosophy of deconstruction and analytic philosophy has entailed the emergence of life-writing, and created the intellectual need to theorize biography in this la...
ESSAY REVIEW II MUST BIOGRAPHY BE EDUCAnON-u.? Must Biography Be Educational?
1999
A hoary but persistent tradition has it that people's lives, once in print, become exemplary and educational. Aristotle put his stamp on this idea, Plutarch famously supplied it with content, and, closer to ourown time, the Victorians and the Edwardians gaveit a moralistic twist. One thinks of Thomas Carlyle and his imitators, Leslie Stephen and his "moral progeny," John Morley and his imitators in the field of political biography, and Lytton Strachey, inimitable in his insight that "great" people mostly have feet of clay. In this lineage, the biographer's task (apart from recounting the agreed facts of a life) is to warn readers of moral danger, to urge moral greatness, or to tell of the links between greatness of character and greatness ofdeeds-or all three. In raising questions like these, and furthermore intensifying our sensibility, biographers were and are "educating"-but only if one accepts a morally-freighted definition of education.' Since at least the 1920s biographers have been voting with their pens and their computers. Their verdict is in. They havemoved awayfrom moralized consi deration of lives past and present. Under the old job description, biographers found themselves performing functions once restricted to prophets. Fewer and fewer found they could honestly make strong ethical, aesthetic, social, and poli tical prescriptions, or see this as their primary obligation. The New York Review I Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1360 a 18-37; Politics,ed. E. Barker, II c. V, § 16. Aristotle thought study of past lives,and of history more generally,wouldencouragean inductivehabit of mind. Historical biography was necessaryif one hoped to makepolitical generalizations,especially about the "kinds of people" which this or that constitutional arrangement might suit.
How New is the New Biography? Some Remarks on the Misleading Term's Past and Present
article in Studia Europaea Gnesnensia, 2018
The article discusses the issue of the so-called "new biography" by underscoring ambiguity of the term and presenting the different variants of "new biography" it encompasses. In order to do that, an introduction is made where the tenets of the classical biography are outlined. The inquiry focuses chiefly on England and the USA, although remarks are also made with respect to biographical writing in other countries. It appears that the term is contemporarily mainly associated with Lytton Strachey's model of biography which, having been formulated in 1918, proved a breakthrough in life writing, since it operated with ironic detachment from the protagonist. Strachey perceived biography as an art and was determined to speak openly about all spheres of the biographee's life. The article proves that although other attempts at creating a "new biography" were made after Strachey (by Leon Edel and Jo Burr Margadant), their newness is either derivative and supplementary to Strachey's achievement, or advances a wholly new notion of biography, with the concept of multiplicity of the protagonist's self. As the Stracheyan biographical model is almost a century old, one can assume that what is understood as "new biography" is not so new after all. In the meantime, though, biographical practice has taken a turn and a novelistic mode of writing, i.e. biofiction, has become the current paradigm. The author therefore suggests that the present-day understanding of "new biography" be reconsidered by recognizing biofiction as one of the figures of biographical "newness".