Hermeneutics and Literary Biography

Abstract

If we take humanism to be a particular concept of individual (we might say that humanism is belief in autonomous subject), then we may trace modern concept of biography and autobiography as portrayal of growth of consciousness back to nineteenth-century historiography and philosophy. In his monumental study, A History of Autobiography in Antiquity, Georg Misch writes, the history of autobiography is a history of selfawareness. Misch follows his teacher and father-in-law, Wilhelm Dilthey, by treating autobiography as 'highest and most instructive form in which understanding of life comes before us' and human self-awareness as a peculiarly Western phenomenon.' More recently, Georges Gusdorf goes as far as to equate autobiography and individuality with Western humanist culture: It [autobiography] expresses a concern peculiar to Western man. According to Gusdorf, autobiography is possible only when humanity must have emerged