Post by ernesto thaddeus m. solmerano on Jun 25, 2007 23:59:13 GMT -5
Biographical Criticism
Overview
Using information about an author's life and background to better understand and analyze his or her work. Such an approach to literature is based on the belief that a writer's life may shed light on his or her literature and the literature of the era.
Advantages to this approach
-It helps the reader to understand elements the author uses in his work, such as words, allusions, themes, characters ...etc.
-The author's background often adds significance to the written work.
-It helps the reader to discover the author's audience and intention.
Mistakes to avoid when using this approach
-Don't assume that the author's life is necessarily the same as the work's contents.
-Avoid using unsound sources of information about the author's life.
Despite the advantages and insights made possible by biographical criticism, the major problem with this approach is known as the BIOGRAPHICAL FALLACY (also known as the INTENTIONAL FALLACY), which is the simple merging of the author with his or her fiction or the fiction with the author. Essentially, it is the danger of trying to find the author in the work or the work through the author.
The Problem of Knowing The Author
Par of the problem with biographical criticism is “retrieving” the author and the methods we have of doing that.
Suddenly the biographer realizes that he has never seen this man before. The man he knows exists only on paper. He does not sweat. There are no flies on this man, no dust on his boots. In that instant the biographer knows a truth which he can never properly say without giving up his calling: the man in the photograph is dead, decayed, and completely irretrievable. The biographer has come up against the inevitable wall, crannied to be sure, but nonetheless absurd. Then does the biographer know despair, chew it methodically, and, after a proper pause, go existentially on with his work, understanding for the first time the limits of his genre and the fiction nature of his trade. - Michael Reynolds, a Hemingway biographer
Objectivity vs. Subjectivity
Later in the same piece, Reynolds goes on to note: “Once I believed under the tutelage of Eliot, that the author should be invisible. Objectivity was all. Only within recent years, have I come to understand that objectivity does not exist. Whitehead [the physicist], among others, taught us the impossibility of totally observing any phenomenon. Contemporary physics contends that we cannot observe an experience without changing it. The only reality is in our own minds. Objectivity, behind which so many biographers have hidden, is simply a fictional ploy.”
The Problem of the Author
Post-structuralist criticism points out the other major problem of biographical criticism (and this one is more existentially intimidating); it questions the idea of selfhood and the self as a willfully acting subject in the first place.
At the heart arguments about biography and biographical criticism is the issue of the self as an autonomous subject, an individual human consciousness endowed with freedom of thought and will, of personhood and selfhood. Although Western culture is deeply committed to this idea of self, its discursive (re)production of individual human subjectivity has not often been interrogated.
It is important to realize that biography and biographical criticism rely on subjectivity [of the author], intentionality, facthood, totality and coherence—all of which come into question in post-modernism and post-structuralism. As a result, biography and biographical criticism is a vital contemporary “arena of dispute” in which these important issues cannot avoid being contested.
According to William Epstein: biography and biography criticism are “life-texts” and as such are “powerful and influential discourses precisely and strategically situated at the intersections of objectivity and subjectivity, body and mind, self and other, the natural and the cultural, fact and fiction as well as many other dyads with which Western civilization has traditionally theorized both the practices and representations of everyday life.”
Overview
Using information about an author's life and background to better understand and analyze his or her work. Such an approach to literature is based on the belief that a writer's life may shed light on his or her literature and the literature of the era.
Advantages to this approach
-It helps the reader to understand elements the author uses in his work, such as words, allusions, themes, characters ...etc.
-The author's background often adds significance to the written work.
-It helps the reader to discover the author's audience and intention.
Mistakes to avoid when using this approach
-Don't assume that the author's life is necessarily the same as the work's contents.
-Avoid using unsound sources of information about the author's life.
Despite the advantages and insights made possible by biographical criticism, the major problem with this approach is known as the BIOGRAPHICAL FALLACY (also known as the INTENTIONAL FALLACY), which is the simple merging of the author with his or her fiction or the fiction with the author. Essentially, it is the danger of trying to find the author in the work or the work through the author.
The Problem of Knowing The Author
Par of the problem with biographical criticism is “retrieving” the author and the methods we have of doing that.
Suddenly the biographer realizes that he has never seen this man before. The man he knows exists only on paper. He does not sweat. There are no flies on this man, no dust on his boots. In that instant the biographer knows a truth which he can never properly say without giving up his calling: the man in the photograph is dead, decayed, and completely irretrievable. The biographer has come up against the inevitable wall, crannied to be sure, but nonetheless absurd. Then does the biographer know despair, chew it methodically, and, after a proper pause, go existentially on with his work, understanding for the first time the limits of his genre and the fiction nature of his trade. - Michael Reynolds, a Hemingway biographer
Objectivity vs. Subjectivity
Later in the same piece, Reynolds goes on to note: “Once I believed under the tutelage of Eliot, that the author should be invisible. Objectivity was all. Only within recent years, have I come to understand that objectivity does not exist. Whitehead [the physicist], among others, taught us the impossibility of totally observing any phenomenon. Contemporary physics contends that we cannot observe an experience without changing it. The only reality is in our own minds. Objectivity, behind which so many biographers have hidden, is simply a fictional ploy.”
The Problem of the Author
Post-structuralist criticism points out the other major problem of biographical criticism (and this one is more existentially intimidating); it questions the idea of selfhood and the self as a willfully acting subject in the first place.
At the heart arguments about biography and biographical criticism is the issue of the self as an autonomous subject, an individual human consciousness endowed with freedom of thought and will, of personhood and selfhood. Although Western culture is deeply committed to this idea of self, its discursive (re)production of individual human subjectivity has not often been interrogated.
It is important to realize that biography and biographical criticism rely on subjectivity [of the author], intentionality, facthood, totality and coherence—all of which come into question in post-modernism and post-structuralism. As a result, biography and biographical criticism is a vital contemporary “arena of dispute” in which these important issues cannot avoid being contested.
According to William Epstein: biography and biography criticism are “life-texts” and as such are “powerful and influential discourses precisely and strategically situated at the intersections of objectivity and subjectivity, body and mind, self and other, the natural and the cultural, fact and fiction as well as many other dyads with which Western civilization has traditionally theorized both the practices and representations of everyday life.”
