Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 279 William H. Epstein, ed. Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1991. xi + 251 pp. $30.50. Few literary practices have remained less touched by the spectacular investment and speculation in critical theory over the last decade than biography. Unlike its sister genre, autobiography, which attracted unprecedented critical interest and institutional endorsement during the 1980s, biography, at least within academia, found itself the poor relation. Obdurate in the face of theory, most biographers are no doubt grateful for the academic neglect since, if nothing else, it has enabled them to continue unabated their pursuit of the biographical subject without it or them being subjected to "the terrible engines" of Marxian, poststructural or feminist hermeneutics. And in any case, their prolific labors are capitalized and ratified through the marketplace. But for scholars and critics of biography, this poor relation's academic marginalization and critical neglect can only be viewed with alarm. Although the output of literary biographies has probably never been greater than it is today, the amount of biographical criticism has, if anything, diminished. Few full-length biographical studies seriously engage contemporary theory and only one, to my knowledge (William H. Epstein's Recognizing Biography, parts of which were first published in Biography), can even begin to compare with the level of sophistication that is now commonplace in autobiographical studies. As a result, biography still remains under-theorized as a genre and virtually unexamined as a discursive and ideological practice; most biographical critics would probably not even acknowledge that biography and biographical criticism were ideological or that they performed any "cultural work" except, of course, the circulation of "truth." Given biography's marginalization and biographical criticism's general impoverishment , the announcement last year that Purdue University Press would be launching a series called The Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism, under Epstein's general editorship, came as welcome news. Contesting the Subject, the first volume in the series, although not exactly the integral and defining volume one was led to expect from the promotional copy, is nevertheless an excellent "sampler" of recent examples of critical writing that amply support Epstein's contention that biographical criticism can only be invigorated by an engagement with contemporary theory . There are probably many reasons for biography's "theoretical embarrassment," to quote Jonathan Arac, but none is perhaps more important than the crisis of legitimacy brought about by the structuralist and poststructuralist assault waged by Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida upon the traditional humanist assumptions of the author as originating subject. While "the death of the author" only seemed to make autobiography, which was never entirely invested in this humanist epistemology to begin with, that much more interesting as a subject of theory and criticism, it became a skeleton in the closet for biography, which was heavily invested in the traditional assumptions about authorship, intentionality, objectivity, "truth." The dilemma for biographical critics has not just been the scandal of epistemological naivete but the fact that, unlike autobiography, which is by definition a self-reflexive form, biography is not a genre that readily accommodates the kind of metacritical reflexivity that has so invigorated autobiographical criticism. It is probably for these two reasons that Epstein's sampler contains so many essays that address biography's legitimacy through a revisionist reading of the death of the author and why so many of the discus- 280 biography Vol. 16, No. 3 sions of biography tend to be conflated with or become displaced by discussions of autobiography. Stanley Fish's "Biography and Intention," the first essay in the collection, seems expressly designed (perhaps even solicited) as biography's endorsement. Fish's strategy is to repudiate biography's marginality by claiming it is paradigmatic of all textual encounters. Taking issue with the New Critical and (post)structuralist assault upon intention and autonomous agency, Fish argues that If the originating author is dissolved into a series of functions, . . . then we have not done away with intention and biography but merely relocated them. In principle it does not matter whether the originating agent is a discrete human consciousness or the spirit of the age or a...