Biography in Theory

Wilhelm Hemecker, Edward Saunders, Wilhelm Hemecker, Edward Saunders

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783110516692
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

This textbook is an anthology of significant theoretical discussions of biography as a genre and as a literary-historical practice. Covering the 18th to the 21st centuries, the reader includes programmatic texts by authors such as Herder, Carlyle, Dilthey, Proust, Freud, Kracauer, Woolf and Bourdieu. Each text is accompanied by a commentary placing its contribution in critical context.

Ideal for use in undergraduate seminars, this reader may also be of interest for academic researchers in the areas of literary studies and history aiming to get an overview of historical questions in biographical theory.

This revised and updated English language edition also includes new translations of texts by J. G. Herder and Stefan Zweig, as well as an introductory discussion on the possibility of a 'theory of biography'.

Note: Due to copyright reasons, the chapter "Sade, Fourier, Loyola [Extract] (1971)" (pp. 175–177) by Roland Barthes could not be included in the ebook.

List of Contributors

Albert Dikovich is a researcher in the DFG Research Training Group ‘The Problem of the Real in Modern Culture’, University of Konstanz. He was a researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography (LBI) from 2012–17.

Bernhard Fetz is Director of the Literary Archives, the Literature Museum and the Department of Planned Languages / Esperanto Museum of the Austrian National Library. He was co-founder of the LBI in 2005 and was Deputy Director until 2009. He is the editor of Die Biographie – Zur Grundlegung ihrer Theorie (‘Towards a Theory of Biography’, De Gruyter, 2009).

Vanessa Hannesschläger is a literary scholar based at the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities, Austrian Academy of Sciences. She was a researcher at the LBI from 2013–16, working on the project ‘Ernst Jandl Online’ in partnership with the Austrian National Library. Her research interests include archive and biography theory, digital editing, and modern Austrian literature.

Tobias Heinrich teaches German language and contemporary German, Austrian and Swiss culture and literature at the University of Oxford. He was Deputy Director of the LBI from 2012–14. He is the author of Leben lesen. Zur Theorie der Biographie um 1800 (‘Reading Lives: On the Theory of Biography around 1800’, Böhlau, 2016).

Wilhelm Hemecker is Director of the LBI, which he co-founded in 2005. He is University Professor for the History and Theory of Biography at the Department of European and Comparative Literature and Language Studies, University of Vienna.

Marie Kolkenbrock is a Research Associate at the Department of German and Dutch, University of Cambridge, as part of the LBI’s partnership with the University. Her first monograph, Stereotype and Destiny: Arthur Schnitzler’s Narrative Fiction, is due to be published in Bloomsbury’s ‘New Directions in German Studies’ series in 2018. She is currently working on a new scholarly biography of Schnitzler.

Esther Marian was a researcher at the LBI from 2005 until her unexpected death in 2011. Her key research interests were the theoretical presuppositions of biographical writing, particularly the work of Siegfried Kracauer, and theories of gender with relation to biography.

Cornelius Mitterer has been a researcher at the LBI since 2012. He is currently completing a study of the Austrian writer Richard von Schaukal and his literary networks, which engages in particular with Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the ‘literary field’. His research interests include Viennese Modernism and Italian ‘modernismo’.

Manfred Mittermayer is Director of the Literary Archives in Salzburg. He was a Key Researcher at the LBI from 2005–12, during which time he wrote Thomas Bernhard. Eine Biografie (‘Thomas Bernhard: A Biography’, Residenz, 2015).

Caitríona Ní Dhúill is Senior Lecturer in German in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Durham, working on nineteenth- and twentieth-century German and comparative literature, utopian fiction and theory, gender theory, and biography. She was a researcher at the LBI from 2005–09.

David Österle has been a researcher and assistant to the director at the LBI since 2011. He is currently completing a study on the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

Katharina Prager has been a researcher at the LBI since 2012, as part of a partnership with the Wienbibliothek (Vienna City Library), working on the digital biography ‘Karl Kraus Online’. Her research also focuses on biography and its connections with gender and memory. She is the author of two biographies dealing with exile (Salka Viertel) and Viennese Modernism (Berthold Viertel).

Edward Saunders is Deputy Director of the LBI, where he has been a researcher since 2012. His work focuses on twentieth-century literary history, life-writing and cultural memory. He is the author of a biography of the Hungarian-British writer Arthur Koestler (Reaktion Books, 2017).

Footnotes

1 Alison Booth: ‘Prosopography and Crowded Attention in Old and New Media’. In: On Life Writing. Ed. Zachary Leader. Oxford, 2015, pp. 72–98 (p. 86).

2 Jonathan Culler: Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, 1997, p. 3.

3 Culler: Literary Theory, p. 4.

4 David Ellis: The Truth about William Shakespeare. Fact, Fiction, and Modern Biographies. Edinburgh, 2012, p. ix.

5 Quoted in Zachary Leader: ‘Introduction’. In: On Life-Writing. Ed. Zachary Leader. Oxford, 2015, pp. 1–6 (p. 6).

6 Ray Monk: ‘Life without Theory: Biography as an Exemplar of Philosophical Understanding’. In: Poetics Today 28:3 (2007), pp. 527–570.

7 Monk: ‘Life without Theory’, p. 556.

8 Michael Benton: Towards a Poetics of Literary Biography. Basingstoke and New York, 2015, p. 4.

9 Dmitri Kalugin: ‘Soviet Theories of Biography ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Theory of Biography or Biography in Theory?
• The Rambler 60 (13 October 1750)
• The Idler 24 (24 November 1759)
• Samuel Johnson’s Advice to Biographers
• Fifth Letter on the Furtherance of Humanity (1793)
• The Living Memory of Biography: Johann Gottfried Herder’s ‘Fifth Letter on the Furtherance of Humanity’
• On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History [Extract] (1840)
• World History as Heroic Biography: Thomas Carlyle’s ‘Great Men’
• Plan for the Continuation of the Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences [Extract] [1904–10]
• Between Art and Academia: Wilhelm Dilthey’s Theory of Biography
• The Method of Sainte-Beuve [Extract] [1909]
• Against Biographical Interpretation: Marcel Proust’s Attack on Sainte-Beuve
• Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood [Extract] (1910)
• The Riddles of Sigmund Freud’s Leonardo – Biography, Case History, or …?
• Preface to Eminent Victorians (1918)
• Biography as Exposure: Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians
• Literature and Biography (1923)
• In Search of the Literary Fact: Boris Tomashevsky and the Limits of the Biographical Approach
• The Biography of the Object (1929)
• In the Name of the Collective: Sergei Tretiakov’s Plea for a Biography of the Object
• The Biography as an Art Form of the New Bourgeoisie (1930)
• How to Make Employees Matter: Siegfried Kracauer’s Critique of Biography
• The New Biography (1927)
• The Art of Biography (1939)
• The Biographical Craft: Virginia Woolf’s Contributions to the Theory of Biography
• History as a Poetess (1943)
• Biography between Poetry and History: Stefan Zweig’s ‘History as a Poetess’
• The Progressive-Regressive Method [Extract] (1957)
• Tracing the ‘projet original’: Jean-Paul Sartre’s Biographical Hermeneutics
• Sade, Fourier, Loyola [Extract] (1971)
• A Life in Memory Fragments: Roland Barthes’s ‘Biographemes’
• ‘Hanging Up Looking Glasses at Odd Corners’: Ethnobiographical Prospects (1978)
• Provincializing the Biographical Subject: James Clifford’s Manifesto for a ‘Less Centred’ Biography
• Landscape for a Good Woman [Extract] (1986)
• Intersectional Biography: Class, Gender, and Genre in Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman
• The Biographical Illusion (1986)
• Life as Trajectory: Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘The Biographical Illusion’ (1986)
• Representing Women: Re-presenting the Past [Extract] (1989)
• Things Mean Differently at Different Historical Moments: Re-thinking (Literary) History and Biography
• Post-Thomas Edison (Recalling an Anti-Biography) (2003)
• From ‘Anti-Biography’ to Online Biography?
• Approaching Celebrity Studies [Extract] (2010)
• Biography and Celebrity Studies
• List of Sources
• Editorial Note
• Select Bibliography
• List of Contributors