Abstract
The biographical subject is the cultural object par excellence. By examining how biographers go about the task of studying and assembling their biographical texts, we will acquire a better appreciation of the nature of cultural objects and the appropriate philosophical and methodological strategies that facilitate the description and explanation of such objects. I begin by reflecting upon the practice of biographical writing in order to illuminate and explicate some of the salient features and theoretical concerns of biographical writing as experienced by practicing biographers. I then canvass and discuss ways in which biographies play relevant methodological and cultural roles.
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Michael Holroyd, “Literary and Historical Biography,” in New Directions in Biography, edited by Anthony M. Friedson (Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1979), 23.
Katherine Frank, “Writing Lives: Theory and Practice in Literary Biography,” Genre 13 (Winter 1980), 499. Similarly, Leon Edel, in the introduction to the last volume of his Henry James writes: “I believe biography to be the most taken for granted—and the least discussed—of all the branches of literature. Biographies are widely read, but they are treated as if they came ready-made.… biographies are accepted as they come and relished for their revelations.… [But] questions of form, composition, structure are seldom raised.” Leon Edel, Henry James: The Master: 1901–1916 (New York: Lippincott, 1972), 19–20.
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Ibid., 140.
cf. Ibid., 141.
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C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 6.
Leon Edel, “Biography: A Manifesto,” 3.
Woolf, “The Art of Biography,” 169.
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© 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Daniel, M. (1994). Biography as a Cultural Discipline. In: Daniel, M., Embree, L. (eds) Phenomenology of the Cultural Disciplines. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 16. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-28556-6_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-28556-6_13
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