Biographical Discourse Research Articles

O DISCURSO BIOGRÁFICO NA TELEVISÃO: MEMÓRIA E CONDIÇÕES DE PRODUÇÃO EM UM PROGRAMA SOBRE SANTOS DUMONT

This paper analyzes the functioning of the biographical discourse, using as corpus the special TV program Santo, produced by EPTV, a TV station, affiliated of Rede Globo in Campinas (SP), Brazil. Based on authors, such as Foucault (2004), Orlandi (1993) and Pecheux (2009; 2010), from the theory of the Discourse Analysis, the paper seeks to promote a dialogue with the notion of “biographical illusion” by Pierre Bourdieu (2006). Our interest is to demonstrate, in that way, the speaking position of a regional television station and of a program produced by the journalism department could produce effects of enunciation, putting the memory and journalistic ethics in tension, with a view to constructing a historical narrative and feasible from the audiovisual perspective, however maintaining still a regional identity, even with a person, Santos Dumont, that does not presuppose geographical limits. Keywords: Biographical discourse; Identity; Memory; Regional journalism.

Le bio-bibliografie immaginarie di Bolaño e le biografie infedeli di Orecchio come approcci letterari alle verità della storia, della vita

Anche se Davide Orecchio non lo avesse dichiarato in modo esplicito, il fatto che sulla sua formazione letteraria abbia avuto un peso, tra altre letture, pure quella dell’opera di Bolaño viene suggerito dalle caratteristiche stesse del suo lavoro. Vanno in quel senso tanto una pratica della scrittura quale attività che cresce raccogliendo e travestendo altra scrittura (in un pullulare di richiami intertestuali), quanto un confrontarsi con la storia attraverso il frequente uso di documenti d’invenzione. A parte un riconosciuto debito di entrambi nei confronti di Borges, a legittimare un accostamento dell’opera di questo narratore contemporaneo italiano a quella di Roberto Bolaño, che è stato un autore culto per molti della generazione formatasi nell’ultima fase del XX secolo, non sono, del resto, solo alcune strategie narrative, ma anche un insistito sguardo sulla presenza del male nell’esistenza umana. Si tratta in ogni caso di punti di convergenza che non tolgono nulla a specifiche identità di stile e a precise posizioni di poetica.

Saint Laurent on Screen: Fashion Icon, Doomed Artist, or Celebrity?

The two recent “competing” French biopics devoted to Yves Saint Laurent—Yves Saint Laurent (Lespert, 2014) and Saint Laurent (Bonello, 2014)—underscore the tensions between biographical discourse and discourse on fashion. On one hand, while the representation of a tortured genius tends to eclipse the creations of the designer, on the other hand, the importance of the relationship between Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé also attests to a historic moment in the linkages between haute couture and the fashion industry. Although these two biopics regard this moment with nostalgia, turning Saint Laurent into “the last of the greats,” they clearly inscribe their protagonists in a contemporary culture of celebrity, in which the world of fashion actively participates: something that can be observed both in the films themselves, and also in specific circumstances attending their production. Similarly, a comparison between these two films suggest the ways in which biopics about fashion designers, by celebrating what is known these days as “French-identified global brands,” serve simultaneously as a strategy to promote the label and as a strategy for finding an international audience for French cinema.

Being Geniuses Together: Ghostwriting and the Uncanny of Robert McAlmon’s and Kay Boyle’s (Out of) Joint Autobiography

Kay Boyle’s supplementary edition (1968) of Robert McAlmon’s Being Geniuses Together (1938) is a self-deconstructive survey of the expatriate community of English and American writers and artists in Paris in the 1920s. Boyle’s version prompts questions about originality and autobiographical truth through the way in which her chapters are alternated with McAlmon’s chapters in a post-mortem “dialogue” or ghostwriting experiment and frequently seem to bracket or undermine his version of the “same” story. I am interested in the way in which self-writing and autobiography in general, and in particular experimental forms of collaborative, queer, or “mock” autobiography, have been used to conjure up supposedly True Stories of the Lost Generation and literary Modernism. Few crowds are as famous, as notorious, as surrounded by myth, as extensively written about in various more or less autobiographical texts, as the “in” crowd of writers, artists, critics and publishers in Paris in the 1920s. The story of Modernism, often a form of contemporary self-definition, has been told and retold and contested in a chorus of autobiographical and biographical discourses competing for the right to present the True Story. In my article, I explore how McAlmon and Boyle present their shared experiences of being American writers in exile in Europe in ways which are sometimes similar and sometimes widely divergent.

The Casus of Artemy Lebedev in the Context of Professional Designer’s Mythology Formation

The article deals with mythological structures of the phenomenon of professional designer’s tradition. For a long time, professional design was deemed a “by-product” phenomenon and a periphery of the “true” art, and therefore it was studied insufficiently. Only at the cusp of the 20th and 21st centuries, the designing activity in Russia became a separate profession, which allowed forming its own corporate culture. Researching this culture is a new and actual scientific problem, because of development of the profession of designer and its growing importance in the contemporary socio-cultural spaces. This area includes specific norms, values and ima- ginative beliefs, which allow to advance the hypothesis that they can be considered as a form of social consciousness or a myth as a means of constructing reality. The corporate mythology is analyzed through representation and formation of professional identity, within the archetypal matrix included in the professional community. Identification of the ideal-typical construction describing the cultural shape of designers’ community is of great interest. The article contains a qualitative analysis of the Russian designer Artemy Lebedev’s biographical discourse, which is made to define the specificity of mythmaking. This analysis is based on Internet resources.

Digital José Juan Tablada and the genesis of a hyper reading

This essay describes how the development of two digital projects dealing with the works of the Mexican poet José Juan Tablada affected the nature of the reading and writing practices of the author and other participants. The first project, produced in the years of 1997 and 1998, comprises two CD-ROM’s with two important sets of journalistic chronicles: La Babilonia de Hierro. Crónicas neoyorquinas (1920-1936) (724 chronicles) and México de día y de noche. Crónicas mexicanas (1928-1943) (399 chronicles). The second one resulted in another CD-ROM, José Juan Tablada: letra e imagen (poesía, prosa, obra gráfica y varia documental) (2003), which included Tablada’s graphic archive, his four visual poetry books and other works involving the relationship between word and image. The project also includes a website (www.tablada.unam.mx). The author points out how automated text searches provided by the first CD’s helped in the annotation process of the graphic archive pieces —which encompass watercolors; pencil, charcoal and ball pen drawings; photographs and clippings from reviews and journals—, and how the careful observation of these images revealed information of Tablada’s life and works. This information had remained unattended because the pieces of the archive had been considered almost exclusively in their visual dimension rather than in relation with the literary realm. The author discusses the three modalities of reading —close, hyper and machine reading— proposed by N. Katherine Hayles, in How We Think (2012), and shows how Tablada’s digital research projects lead to practice the two latter reading modalities in a natural and unperceived way. The recollection of the whole experience also demonstrated that hyper reading promoted by the construction of the website resulted in mnemonic modifications that linked the graphic archive images to Tablada’s biographical discourse.---Original in English.

Winifred Rushforth and the Davidson Clinic for Medical Psychotherapy: a case study in the overlap of psychotherapy, Christianity and New Age spirituality.

The activities of both Winifred Rushforth (1885-1983), and the Edinburgh-based Davidson Clinic for Medical Psychotherapy (1941-73) which she directed, exemplify and elaborate the overlap in Scotland of religious discourses and practices with psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Even as post-war secularization began to affect Scottish culture and society, Rushforth and the Davidson Clinic attempted to renew the biographical discourses of Christianity using the idioms and practices of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Furthermore, alongside these Christian-inflected activities, Rushforth promoted a psychoanalytically-informed New Age spirituality. This parallel mode of belief and practice drew on Christian life-narrative patterns, preserving them within psychoanalytic forms grafted onto a vitalist worldview informed by the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Features of the Concept FAMILIE Represented in the Biographical Discourse of Russian Germans

This paper describes a study conducted within the framework of modern German studies in accordance with the anthropocentric orientation of scientific paradigm. The study investigates the concept FAMILIE in the linguistic image of the world of Russian Germans living in Siberia. The contextual analysis of biographical stories of the representatives of the German ethnic community has helped us discover that the concept FAMILIE enters into complex hierarchical relationships with related concepts. Building a taxonomic model of this concept revealed its base, super- and subordinate levels and their linguistic realization.

The Discursive Construction of Co-Ethnic Migration

This paper investigates the discursive construction of co-ethnic migration in German society. Taking a biographical study on ethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union as a starting point, the author traces co-ethnic immigrant pathways in German society and analyzes the legal frameworks, institutions, and organizations encountered by these migrants. The author employs a critical discourse analysis approach to texts relating to a camp where newly arriving immigrants live and undergo registration. The article proposes a new way of researching discursive construction, using biographical interviews as a starting point for identifying “localities of discourse” which are important to the group in question. Such an approach allows us to find relevant sources of discourse in a way that is grounded in empirical material, and subsequently to account for which discourses are appropriated by members of certain social groups, such as co-ethnic migrants. The article thus builds a bridge between biographical sociology and critical discourse analysis, using the former as a point of departure for framing the selection of materials for implementing the latter. The article makes a methodological contribution by introducing the concept “locality of discourse” as a bridge between biographical sociology and critical discourse analysis. The author also makes an empirical contribution by examining a border transit camp in Germany as a “locality of discourse” and showing how the camp informs our understanding of the place of co-ethnic migrants in German society.

Becoming MadBio-Graphically: The Styling Body in Modern Japanese Literature

This study is situated against the broader theoretical premise: when modern Japanese literary criticism made an epochal turn towards theory in the 1980s, all that might fall under the designation of the “biographical”—material, method, or ethic—became the unmourned remains of the critical past, now inhibiting the critical future. My purpose is twofold: to delineate this critical impasse and to propose a theoretically viable allowance for the biographical. My inquiry draws on the particular nexus of biographical écriture and literary historical positioning illuminated by the author Uno Kōji (1891–1961). Uno's case demonstrates not only the humanistic folly and attendant violence that biographical discourse can commit but also the possibility of the writing (graphia) of life (bios). If there is any conceptual transaction between these two possibilities, it is to be found in mimesis, which operates not only in the (very real) fantasy of the “life and work” continuum but also in the sensual experience of the text as the Other's life-words, an important aspect of Uno's authorial actuality. It is the body that finally brings these disparate modalities of mimesis into a concerted text of life—the body that styles across the phenomenal boundary between text and life. In tracing the styling body, I argue, we may witness the singular continuity that is writing, affecting text and life as life-text and affording a different experience of biography's palpability—bio-graphy.

Structure and Functions of the Biographical Encyclopedic Article: Case Study of American and British Linguistic Cultures

The article focuses on the structure and functions of the encyclopedic article, the problem of in linguistics and variative features of articles (case study of American and British linguistic cultures). The article aims at achieving different tasks: to define the terms discourse and biographical discourse; to distinguish the functions of articles; to analyze the structure of articles. In our research we used such methods as: functional, definitive and structural-semantic analysis.

Luciano e a experimentação biográfica: filosofia e religião

The purpose of this work is based on the following issues: how the religious aspect is focused on biographical works and what constitutes its function; how religious discourse interferes with conception of the genre of biographical and literary prose from the perspective of Lucian of Samosata. For that we will use as a benchmark for our analysis some conceptions about the religious phenomenon in works with biographical tone of Isocrates, Plato and Xenophon, in order to check how Lucian resumes and refigure issues there proposed. In a kind of biographical account and in epistolary form, Lucian somehow promotes a mimesis (here in the sense of a critical refiguring) of reports of Bios, in which he enacts a moral action figure, syncretizes or juxtaposes philosophical adhesion and religious belief. In the biographical works of Lucian: <em>The passing of Peregrinus</em>, <em>Alexander the false prophet</em>, <em>Demonax </em>and somehow <em>Nigrinus</em>, ‘conversion to a current philosophical’ concerns a pathos in the discourse, which is staged so explicitly dramatized and therefore undergo a treatment critical. Thus, we treat this work in order to delineate the constitution of pathos of biographical discourse and status of a distinctive literary biographical prose linked to religious and philosophical questions.

Luciano e a experimentação biográfica: filosofia e religião

The purpose of this work is based on the following issues: how the religious aspect is focused on biographical works and what constitutes its function; how religious discourse interferes with conception of the genre of biographical and literary prose from the perspective of Lucian of Samosata. For that we will use as a benchmark for our analysis some conceptions about the religious phenomenon in works with biographical tone of Isocrates, Plato and Xenophon, in order to check how Lucian resumes and refigure issues there proposed. In a kind of biographical account and in epistolary form, Lucian somehow promotes a mimesis (here in the sense of a critical refiguring) of reports of Bios, in which he enacts a moral action figure, syncretizes or juxtaposes philosophical adhesion and religious belief. In the biographical works of Lucian: The passing of Peregrinus, Alexander the false prophet, Demonax and somehow Nigrinus, ‘conversion to a current philosophical’ concerns a pathos in the discourse, which is staged so explicitly dramatized and therefore undergo a treatment critical. Thus, we treat this work in order to delineate the constitution of pathos of biographical discourse and status of a distinctive literary biographical prose linked to religious and philosophical questions.

Reflexões sobre a memória biográfica no meio audiovisual contemporâneo

The biographical discourse follows a traditional positivist model, focused on relations of cause and effect, and composes a chronological logic to present a life story. In the last decades, scholars have questioned this crystallized form and have offered new possibilities for the writing of the biographies. The audiovisual product, object of interest of this work, despite certain advantages over paper model, still produces screenplays in which the slices of life of an individual are an ordered succession of events in time. The purpose of this article is therefore reflect on how memory is present in the biographical films and what kind of contemporary modifications have been introduced into the trivial model so as to remove the mythical aspect that involves the biographees.

Historia, memoria y biografía en El jinete polaco de Anotnio Muñoz Molina

Los cruces y correspondencias del tiempo histórico y el tiempo biográfico es el sello característico de la ambiciosa novela de Antonio Muñoz Molina, El jinete polaco. Por intermediación del recuerdo el narrador fusiona su memoria individual en la memoria colectiva de Mágina, mítica población que sintetiza y condensa la crisis de una España atrapada en la encrucijada entre la tradición y la modernidad. De esta manera, el tiempo no avanza como un relato histórico convencional, como un conjunto de información lo suficientemente documentada y desplegada en una secuencia lineal, sino como un testimonio caótico que remueve nuevos lugares escondidos con celo dentro del yo. Dicho con otras palabras, a través de la subjetividad de un individuo que analiza en retrospectiva su experiencia personal, irrumpe en paralelo un mosaico fragmentario del pasado y presente de España.Este trabajo tiene por objeto revisar cómo por intermediación del lenguaje la novela logra entretejer una gran variedad de «emplazamientos»; entendiendo por emplazamiento la síntesis de «plaza» (lugar), y plazo (tiempo), y cómo estos binomios espacio-temporales re-construyen la personalidad de un yo.

Blurring Gender Boundaries – Masculine Confessional in Celebrity Auto/biographies

This paper examines the representation of masculinity within the feminine genre of auto/biography through an analysis of biographical discourses used in the construction of star personas. Auto/biographies have the potential to reverse gender roles with male stars’ confessionals often discursively constructed as feminine, blurring gender distinctions within auto/biographical writing. The compulsion to confess has traditionally been seen as a feminine preoccupation but the intensification of celebrity culture would appear to have extended this compulsion to male stars. This paper examines two authorised biographies written about pop star Robbie Williams: Robbie Williams – Somebody Someday (McCrum, 2002) and Feel: Robbie Williams (Heath, 2005) and comedian and actor Russell Brand’s two autobiographies: My Booky Wook (2008) and My Booky Wook 2 – This Time It’s Personal (2010). The paper analyses how in these auto/biographical narratives male stars are represented as using masquerade and role-play, as well as descriptions of mental illness and addictions to construct masculine personas. Masculinity is asserted by representing male stars through the myth of the creative genius whose talents and artistic sensitivities make them vulnerable to mental illness. Part of the masculine persona is constructed through drug/alcohol addiction and re-asserts masculinity through descriptions of promiscuous sexual adventures. There is a tension between the feminine nature of celebrity discourse and the discursive construction of a masculine persona, which appears to blur any rigid or traditional gender boundaries in these biographical narratives, and in the process of doing so, to ‘prove’ the ‘authenticity’ of the star persona.

En Litterær Biografi og Narrative Identitetsbilleder

ABSTRACT The article focuses on the narrative construction of identity in the biographical novel about the life of Madame Tussaud written by the Danish author Dorrit Willumsen. A specific biographical narration technique of Willumsen is the starting point for discussing two interweaving layers of biographical discourse: the historical literary biography and the internal biography (lifeline as a story). Willumsen`s open dialogue of images and words shapes the narration to cross the frame of the principal character`s historical time and places Willumsen`s novel in the European context of narrative literature on artistic images of identity.

Inventing the Self, Fictionalizing the Other: False Memories in the Theatre of Mario Vargas Llosa

The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the most prolific and distinguished Spanish American novelists of the twentieth century and the winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, is also the author of eight plays, which have frequently been overshadowed by his narrative production. Going beyond the relationship traced by critics between his novels and his plays, this essay underscores the prevalence in his theatrical work of a tug of war between biographical and autobiographical voices as part of a fundamental exploration of real and fictional memory. From Vargas Llosa's early plays of the 1980s to his most recent ones, he has frequently dramatized the life of both real and imaginary, famous and infamous others and selves, creating the illusion that the audience is witnessing someone's life trajectory. This is the analytical angle from which this essay approaches not only Vargas Llosa's first play, La señorita de Tacna (1981), but in particular one of his most recent ones, Odiseo y Penélope (2007). In both analyses, the definitions of biographical and autobiographical discourses are interpreted in light of theatrical representation, underscoring in this way the subjective, dramatic, and metaphorical perspectives of these expressions.

Jak umiera pisarz? Śmierci urojone (Morts Imaginaires) Michaela Schneidera jako nekrofikcje

The starting point of Michel Schneider’s Morts imaginaires, which refers to Vies imaginaires of the Belgian symbolist writer Marcel Schwob, is ultima verba, i.e. the last words that could probably be said by dying writers in various times. However, by choosing to talk about them from the perspective of death, the French author does not want to participate in the “necrographical”, offi cial discourse of a writer’s death or in the biographical (historical) discourse, which do not respect the personal and singular experience of death. In this way, literary fi ction about the experience of dying, which is here called “necrofi ction” and which is legitimized by a psychoanalytic approach to the imaginary, becomes an alternative to the official forms of discourse about death or life.

Memória e liminaridade entre discursos biográficos da História, do Jornalismo e da Literatura doi:10.5007/1984-8951.2011v12n100p126

The article emphasizes the memory importance in the identity constitution and, for this, visualizes its manifestation in biographical discourse of History, Journalism and Literature. Through an interdisciplinary analysis, exposes conceptions that guide the biography valorization in these Human Science fields and establishes similarities and differences among them, focusing, in particular, the relation between fiction and reality. The option for biographism is justified by the prominence that this textual gender assumes in the reality reconstructions and in the memory preservation and by provoking reflections about the limits between the historical, journalistic and literary narrative.