Biographical Interpretation Research Articles

Chronicling: Bob Dylan’s Use of Autobiography

Scholars have often practiced a traditional biographical interpretation of the artist Bob Dylan, in which they have asked for the person behind the songs, but Dylan’s Chronicles (2004) puts the biographical understanding and genre up for discussion. The essay shows how Dylan’s Chronicles is part of his diverse artistic praxis.

Research on Li Shangyin Outside Mainland China Since 2010

In the last decade, research on Li Shangyin's poetry outside mainland China has notably shifted away from the traditional biographical interpretation method of "knowing the authors life and analyzing the work." A select few of these papers critically scrutinize the historical facts associated with Li Shangyin, unveiling fallacies in past biographical narratives and challenging the veracity of certain deeds. The majority of recent articles take a departure from the biographical approach, choosing instead to delve directly into the imagery, poetic artistic conception, and writing skills inherent in the text. These article provide in-depth analysis of the meaning and use of language, vocabulary and literary allusion. In some of them, emphasis is placed on the emotional and aesthetic value of Li Shangyin's poetry, with some scholars even regarding its "incomprehensibility" as an achievement rather than a shortcoming. In general, "what does the text of poetry express" has become an more and more important question.

Walt Whitman's Tomb

In letters and conversations with friends and acquaintances, Whitman's ideas about his "burial house" gradually took shape over the four years prior to his death in March 1892. The completion of Whitman's tomb represented the culmination of a complicated series of decisions. While the location of Whitman's tomb, its design, and its cost are topics that have received various critical and biographical interpretations, this essay includes recently uncovered materials that provide a clearer understanding of the process that unfolded in the years prior to Whitman's death regarding his tomb. 

Letters Exchanges between the First Communions. The Darkness before Clairvoyant Eyes

The article is an attempt at a broad contextual and biographical interpretation of Rimbaud’s poem Les premières communions.

Interpretational Circle as the Key Principle of the Philological Investigations of William Shakespeare’s Non-Dramatic Texts

Scholars of Shakespearean studies often encounter the challenge of limited information regarding the biography of the renowned playwright, the textual history of his works, and the intended meaning of some of his texts. However, this study asserts that Shakespeare’s non-dramatic works offer valuable material for biographical interpretation, thereby enhancing readers’ understanding of the texts. The article shows that by adopting an interpretational circle approach, scholars can extract biographically and historically relevant information from these works after gathering initial information and acknowledging the limitations of a biographical approach. The author’s analysis suggests that Shakespeare’s sonnets provide rich biographical material, while the interpretation of “The Phoenix and the Turtle” requires a broader understanding of the historical and cultural context. Shakespeare’s narrative poems, “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece,” fall somewhere in between these two extremes. This study demonstrates the importance of critical thinking, research skills, and the ability to navigate complex literary texts for scholars of Shakespearean studies, highlighting the professional competencies required for success in this field.

Poe’s Last Jest: The Magazine Prison-House, Colonial Exploitation, and Revenge in “Hop-Frog”

Abstract This article looks at Edgar Allan Poe’s “Hop-Frog” in connection with revenge, one of the oldest and richest themes in literature. As the author has done in connection with “The Cask of Amontillado,” this article offers a generalized biographical interpretation of this 1849 story, linking it to Poe’s February 1845 essay “Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House” with its emphasis on “fat,” exploitive “editors and proprietors,” as well as his September 1845 “Marginalia” piece about the sorry state of the American publishing industry. Contending that the story must be read vis-à-vis not only enslavement and slave rebellion, as several critics have done, but also colonization, this article casts doubt on claims that Poe used the tale to settle scores with personal enemies or to revenge himself on the reading public. A brief coda argues that in “Hop-Frog” Poe does not simply avenge himself on those responsible both for his own exploitation as “a poor devil author” and the colonization of American literature generally. Rather, he counterbalances the gruesome, fiery climax with a celebratory compendium of many of his greatest hits through allusions to at least eleven of his writings published between 1835 and 1846.

A Double Margin

Studying the share of women in the historical avant-garde movements, Susan Rubin Suleiman (1990) supported Marguerite Duras's assessment of the avant-garde women writers as being “doubly intolerable” – since they do not correspond to the usual revolutionary point of view or that of women. Suleiman introduced the concept of the double margin to refer to the problem of critical and historical reception of women’s avant-garde writing. Since the procedures of the double marginalisation of women’s avant-garde poetics can be observed in different cultural contexts and literary fields, in this paper we will analyse the critical and historical reception of women writers on the Croatian and Yugoslav literary scene who contributed to the literary magazine Krugovi (Circles, 1952–1958) in the 1950s. Although this generation of writers interprets the aspiration of poetry towards a “universal language” (A. Rimbaud) following the avant-garde usages of grammar, figures of speech, and a depoeticised vocabulary, the traditional readings of women's poetics are often based on the expression of women’s experience, the mind and body split, and the biographical interpretation. On the other hand, the oeuvres of women from the Krugovi generation call for a revaluation of the relation between their poetic strategies and the possible gender politics of their poetry. Therefore, we will demonstrate the possibilities of this revaluation by turning to poetical choices, treatment of the lyric subject and the genre in the texts of Vesna Krmpotić, Vesna Parun, and Irena Vrkljan.

Tropes Revisited: Evert Sprinchorn'sIbsen's Kingdom: The Man and His Worksand Recent Historical Research in Ibsen Studies

Tropes Revisited: Evert Sprinchorn's<i>Ibsen's Kingdom: The Man and His Works</i>and Recent Historical Research in Ibsen Studies

Transnational marriages: National policies, generational transmissions, and gender dynamics – a biographical policy evaluation perspective

ABSTRACT A significant challenge to the understanding of generational transmissions and decisions in migrant families is the unexpectedly emerging orientation of well-educated and socially integrated young German women of Turkish or Moroccan descent towards transnational marriages with husbands from the country of origin of their parents or grandparents. Marriage migrations from Turkey and Morocco may involve trans-border migrations between an EU and a non-EU country with one non-citizen spouse; alternatively, they may take place as family reunification within transnational communities. Our article, by using the method of biographical hermeneutic interpretations of narrations of migrant couples, tries to avoid ‘the state’s lens’ on marriage migration by reconstructing ‘biographical policy evaluation’ by the subjects involved. In conclusion, we will present our reflections regarding the analysis of our empirical case studies.

African Christian Biography: Stories, Lives and Challenges

In the wake of the Dictionary of African Biography (2011) and the Dictionary of African Christian Biography (DACB), the present volume, African Christian Biography, emerges as another important contribution to scholarly discourse at the intersection between “African,” “Christian,” and “Biography.” Dana Robert, the editor, argues that at the heart of the volume is the affirmation of biography as an important form of historical writing that broadens the sources and methodologies for reading Africa’s Christian history. Through biography, she claims, “people become . . . subjects of their own history” (viii). In corroboration, Emmanuel Egbunu, in one of the chapters, laments that the absence of biographical writing has fueled the pervading conception of African Christianity as “a late comer within Global Christianity” (63). Robert’s and Egbunu’s assessments provide a clear trajectory toward understanding the purpose and organization of the book as well as its invaluable contributions to the field of World Christianity. The volume consists of papers presented at a conference marking the twentieth anniversary of the Dictionary of African Christian Biography held at Boston University in 2015.The book’s seventeen chapters are divided into four parts. The first, “The Importance of African Christian Biography and the Role of the DACB,” earmarks the vision and historical trajectory connecting this volume to its parent publication, the DACB. Authors in this section respond to the question of why such a scholarly enterprise should matter in the first place as well as how the DACB sought to awaken this consciousness in view of the new phase of world Christianity as captured in World Christianity studies. According to Jonathan Bonk,Bonk’s vision is clearly expressed in the second and third parts of the volume. While the second, entitled “Biographies of Christian Leaders,” focuses on biographical histories of male and female Christian religious leaders, the third, “Retrieving Women’s Lives,” focuses specifically on the biographical renderings of herstorical characters. Christian leaders such as Krәstos Śämra of Ethiopia, King Afonso I of Kongo, Queen Njinga of Angola, Kgosi Sechele and Seth Mokitimi of South Africa, John Chilembwe of Malawi, Bernard Mizeki of South Africa and Mozambique, and the itinerant prophet William Wade Harris, who transversed across Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, and Ghana, were all engaged alongside female figures such as Nokutela Dube of South Africa, Sikhawulaphi Khumalo and Nellie Maduma Mlotshwa of Zimbabwe. Their biographies are constructed with a view toward the complexities of lived experience at the intersection of Christian and African identities and the colonial and patriarchal powers-that-be.In the last part, “Challenges in Writing African Christian Biography,” the authors return to the core question of reading African Christian history through biographical interpretations and draw out the factors militating against a more robust engagement with this form of historiography. For example, Paul Grant explicitly examines the problem of rupture in the biographical construction of people who endured dehumanization as enslaved persons, colonial subjects, victims of genocide, famine, poverty and other forms of violence. Shining a spotlight on Catherine Zimmerman, who was stolen from the streets of Angola, survived enslavement in the West Indies, and died in Ghana while serving as a missionary with Switzerland’s Basel Missionary Society, Grant examines the various levels of rupture in her lived experiences vis-à-vis his own obligations as a researcher, concluding that “the real problem is moral: it is the problem of historians’ appropriate humility towards the horrible experiences of the African past and the witness offered by the survivors to their heirs” (294). Grant’s observation poignantly underscores the underlying message of faithful interaction with historical sources and resources in the re-enactment of the humanity of biographical figures.African Christian Biography must be praised for its contribution to making scholarship on African Christianity more open to the often-neglected role of biography and oral history using a bottom-up approach. Although most of the contributions come from Southern Africa, the book’s rich collection of remarkable but little-known African Christian figures who helped create Christianity on the continent and beyond, makes it an invaluable resource for scholars of world Christianity, African religions, and African colonial history.

«OPEN BIOGRAPHY». M. A. BIRMAN ON P. M. BITSILLI’S LIFE AND WORK

The paper presents the book of the famous historian M. A. Birman “P. M. Bitsilli (1879–1953). Life and works” (M., 2018). This is the first full-scale biography of a foremost Russian intellectual in exile. Reconstructing the idea and implementation of the “summary overview” monograph proposed by the leader of Bitsillian studies, we substantiate the thesis about the Birman`s text as an “open biography”, a fundamentally unfinished project, an intriguing research proposal for an interdisciplinary Humanities. “Open biography” is open to a variety of biographical interpretation and infinitely deepening understanding, when the “ghost” of hermeneutic circle is no longer a difficulty and almost dead end, but a guide to the fact that the process of comprehension of historical event and individual destiny cannot be completed. The thought moves in an expanding circle. In this sense, the best biography is a subgenre that can be called “materials for biographies (in the plural, it is fundamentally important). One of the most principled question for us what is the internal spiritual and intellectual connection between the author and hero of biography: congeniality or distance? Our point of view, in the version of M. A. Birman this is a position of distance, foreignness, heterogeneity of the scientific attitude. However, such disposition offers new opportunities, creates more multidimensional optics for reading the “book of life” of an outstanding scholar Petr Bitsilli.

Biographical Introduction, Interpretation and Summary of Contents

The eighth volume in the series derives from an MA course in Scandinavian literature entitled ‘Dem Polarlicht auf der Spur. Wissenschaftshistorische und kulturwissen­schaftliche Erkundigungen’, given by Marie-Theres Federhofer at Humboldt University Berlin in 2019. Course participants wrote content summaries of selected texts as part of their exam, some of which were selected for the Aurorae Borealis Studia Classica series. The first student text edited and adapted for publication in the series is by Franziska Runge. She has written about one of the most cherished fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, Sneedronningen (The Snow Queen), first published in 1844 and then reissued with illustrations by Thomas Vilhelm Pedersen in 1849. As demonstrated in Runge’s introduction, Andersen was well aware of the theories of electromagnetism promoted by the physicist Ørsted at precisely this time. Although a Romantic author, Andersen not only endows the aurora with a symbolic role in the narrative, he also alludes to contemporary scientific debates regarding the properties and origin of the phenomenon.

Henry Handel Richardson and Marie Hansen: Musical Lives in Fact and Fiction

Australia’s most internationally celebrated author of the first half of the twentieth century, Henry Handel Richardson (1870–1946), was at one time an aspiring concert pianist who also had a flair for music composition. Richardson’s accounts of her talents and achievements in music performance during her school days in Melbourne, and then at the Leipzig Conservatorium of Music, have been at best vague and at worst misleading. This article seeks to address the issues relating to Richardson’s musical training, competence, and reasons for abandoning a career of performance, through a comparative analysis with her friend and rival, Marie Hansen. An assessment of their shared and separate musical development in Melbourne and Leipzig calls for a re-evaluation of Richardson’s versions of events and, connectedly, the biographical interpretations that have followed.

Thomas Jefferson’s Lives: Biographers and the Battle for History ed. by Robert M. S. McDonald

Reviewed by: Thomas Jefferson’s Lives: Biographers and the Battle for History ed. by Robert M. S. McDonald Edith Gelles Thomas Jefferson’s Lives: Biographers and the Battle for History. Edited by Robert M. S. McDonald. Foreword by Jon Meacham. Afterword by Gordon S. Wood. Jeffersonian America. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Pp. xxxii, 311. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8139-4291-9.) The word Lives in this title may be interpreted in several ways, as shown in this marvelous new collection of essays, finely edited by Robert M. S. McDonald. The essays originated at a 2012 conference at Monticello to commemorate Peter S. Onuf, one of this generation’s master historians of Thomas Jefferson. Each of the other master historians featured in this volume examines the biographical interpretations of a particular era during the nearly two centuries since the third president’s death in 1826, excluding the present generation of Jefferson biographers. Interest in the third president has not flagged since his death; the mythologizing of Jefferson has been of industrial proportions. That is one way to read the titular “Lives.” Another way is that, with each generation, the perception of Jefferson’s character has shifted, reflecting the biographer’s own times. As Jon Meacham writes in the foreword, “there is no such thing as a totally objective life. Biographies . . . often belong to the ages in which they were written no matter how hard some historians may try It can be no other” (p. x). Finally, reading Lives in its verb form, it is clear that Jefferson still baffles biographers, and the challenge to define him continues. R. B. Bernstein, in his fine essay on Dumas Malone, quotes Hermione Lee that biography is “‘a mixed, unstable genre, whose rules keep coming undone [and] the only rule that holds good is that there is no such thing as a definitive biography’” (p. 220). In the end, it is fair to say that the essayists agree with Joseph J. Ellis’s incisive 1997 portrait of Jefferson as the “American Sphinx,” an icon that remains a puzzle. Thomas Jefferson’s Lives: Biographers and the Battle for History is divided into three sections, reflecting the chronology of the biographies. Part 1, “Memory,” begins with a reflection on Jefferson’s own failed efforts to write a memoir, which is followed by a series of essays about the biographers who either knew Jefferson or knew people who were familiar with the paterfamilias. This group includes an adulatory great-granddaughter, Sarah N. Randolph, who, as the late Jan Ellen Lewis points out, emphasized Jefferson’s dislike of public life and claimed he “entered politics only out of ‘a lurking desire to leave to his children the honor’” (p. 87). Not all of the early authors were so romantic [End Page 449] or self-serving in their works. They emphasized Jefferson’s public life and his public service while suppressing his personal life, a slant that, in the period between the early nineteenth century and the Civil War, meant allowing scant attention to slavery, to Jefferson’s absence from public service during the Revolutionary War, and yes, to the scandalous story of his relationship with Sally Hemings. This rumor circulated after 1802, when the journalist James Callender published a reference to Jefferson’s so-called illicit affair. None of these essayists can get away from the subject of Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings, perhaps a telling reflection of the current generation’s contextual focus. The conclusive evidence surfaced in 1998 when the scientific certainty of DNA confirmed the paternity of Hemings’s children. Earlier historians, like Henry S. Randall, whom Andrew Burstein insightfully analyzes along with James Parton, attributed paternity to Jefferson’s nephews, the notorious reprobates, the Carr brothers. Burstein’s Randall “showcased [Jefferson] as the most well-rounded, refined, and resilient of the founders”; “Randall’s work served as justification for all future monuments to the Jefferson whose ‘spirit-stirring pen’ enshrined a world-transformative humanism” (p. 63). Parton’s 1872–1873 biography echoed that sentiment: “‘If Jefferson was wrong, America is wrong. If America is right, Jefferson was right’” (pp. 77–78). In a transitional essay to the second part, Richard...

In the Middle of Nowhere: J. M. Coetzee in South Africa by Jonathan Crewe

Reviewed by: In the Middle of Nowhere: J. M. Coetzee in South Africa by Jonathan Crewe Richard Alan Northover In the Middle of Nowhere: J. M. Coetzee in South Africa BY JONATHAN CREWE UP of America, 2016. v + 117 pp. ISBN 9780761866930 paper. Taking its slightly ironic title from the words of the character Magda in J. M. Coetzee's novel In the Heart of the Country, Jonathan Crewe has written a highly readable and insightful study in which he demonstrates the importance of Coetzee to South African English studies both in initiating new approaches to literature and in marking the end of long established (arguably moribund) ones. Based on his forty-year friendship with Coetzee and focusing on the years from 1972 to 1974 when he worked with him in the English Department of the University of Cape Town, Crewe has written an illuminating book, partly memoir, partly informal biography, and partly critical analysis, on a selection of Coetzee's "South African" fiction, while insisting that Coetzee cannot be narrowly described as a South African writer. Indeed, one of Crewe's many perceptive insights is that Coetzee challenges this category, asserting that from the beginning of his academic career Coetzee set out to undo the canon of South African literature and to deprovincialize the teaching of literature in the University of Cape Town English Department. In fact, Coetzee, having completed his PhD in the United States at the University of Texas at Austin but being forced eventually to return to South Africa, was one of the pioneers in introducing cross-disciplinary research, comparative literature, and linguistics to South African English studies. Some of Crewe's other suggestive insights highlight the humorous and romantic aspects of Coetzee's fiction, significant features largely neglected in the considerable critical literature and scholarship surrounding Coetzee's work. However, typically in Coetzee's work, which tends to extend or to subvert established conventions, the erotic is explored as anti-romance. Crewe demonstrates this [End Page 267] in a refreshing reading of Disgrace, which, he argues, also represents the end of the plaasroman (farm novel). Indeed, Crewe argues that Coetzee's earliest novels, culminating in Disgrace, already mark the end of the anti-apartheid novel too. In his introduction and his chapter on White Writing, Crewe argues that Coetzee was one of the first to emphasize the central importance of the plaasroman in South African literature, then generally considered an obscure Afrikaans genre, tracing it back to the pastoral in European Romanticism. The largeness of Coetzee's perspective is also seen in the range of writers he selects to study in White Writing, both Afrikaans and English, including ideologically suspect and neglected authors. This aligns with Coetzee's awareness of the limitations of ideological approaches to literature and his tendency, nevertheless, to champion the marginalized and voiceless in his writing. His introduction of idleness as a significant phenomenon to investigate in literary studies is likewise inspired and inspiring. Crewe manages to relate aspects of his and Coetzee's life that help to cast light on Coetzee's work without falling into the trap of biographical interpretation. He states at the outset that "[a]lthough I include personal recollection, I do not undertake formal biography" (5). Despite his modest claim that "I write as Coetzee's contemporary and early reader more than as a specialist, playing, to the extent I can, the role of native informant to his global readership and of both native and emigrant commentator on his work" (5), Crewe's book should prove valuable and fascinating both to Coetzee scholars and critics and to a more general readership. [End Page 268] Richard Alan Northover University of South Africa northra@unisa.ac.za Copyright © 2018 The Trustees of Indiana University

Bildung in Crisis: The Hospitality of Negation in Friedrich Schelling’s Clara (1810)

ABSTRACTThis essay proposes that Friedrich Schelling’s experimental narrated dialogue, Clara, or, On Nature’s Connection to the Spirit World (1810), challenges Enlightenment understandings of Bildung as progressive, linear, and perfected by exploring a model of Bildung as crisis in which development is precarious, contingent, and constantly in revision. Following on the work of educational theorist Deborah Britzman, I read the fragmented structure of Clara and, in particular, the “empty place” in Schelling’s manuscript as openings through which to understand Clara’s textual engagement with crisis not as an obstacle that must be overcome, but rather as constitutive of Bildung itself. As a text through which Schelling is thought to have mourned the loss of his wife, Caroline, Clara has mostly been the subject of biographical interpretations and a much wider berth has been given to analyses of the text’s central arguments about the obscurity of the categories of life and death, the here and the hereafter, and the sensible and the insensible. By engaging Clara as a text that exceeds its biographical interest and in which Schelling urges hospitality towards negation, we realize the text as an important work not only in Schelling’s own oeuvre, but also in our own negotiations with Bildung.

Las &amp;#8220;Locas mujeres&amp;#8221; de Gabriela Mistral publicadas por La nación de Buenos Aires (1941-1943)

A genetic analysis of the manuscripts and editions of six poems relating to the “Locas mujeres” section of Lagar (1954) by Gabriela Mistral, published between 1941 and 1943 by La Nacion of Buenos Aires. “La dichosa”, “La desasida” and “La abandonada”, along with “La trocada” and “La tullida”, which were omitted from Lagar but included in manuscript indexes, and finally “La otra”, a poem which appears in the volume Poesias completas (1958) and also belongs to the “Locas mujeres” series. The present study allows us to dismiss the biographical interpretation of these texts as being linked to the death of Juan Miguel Godoy, a reading proposed by Palma Guillen and echoed by a section of Mistralian critics.

Homelands: Reevaluating Traditional Approaches to Cervantes Through Alternative Biographical Interpretation

Homelands: Reevaluating Traditional Approaches to Cervantes Through Alternative Biographical Interpretation

Homelands: Reevaluating Traditional Approaches to Cervantes Through Alternative Biographical Interpretation

Con frecuencia, se interpreta de forma positiva la vida y obra de Cervantes, a pesar de las muchas lagunas que forman parte de su biografia y de la ambiguedad encontrada en las numerosas contradicciones de su prosa. Estas brechas dejan espacio suficiente para unas interpretaciones poco halaguenas que se apartan de las representaciones tradicionales mas hagiograficas del autor. Este ensayo utiliza una interpretacion negativa de la vida y obra de Cervantes como punto de partida para leer su legado historico y literario desde el punto de vista del terrorismo moderno y el renegado aurisecular. El objetivo del ensayo es ofrecer un nuevo marco para las interpretaciones alternativas de la biografia del autor y su oeuvre literaria, mientras se deja al descubierto cierta parcialidad hacia tradiciones criticas positivas.

A Question of Character: Artemisia Gentileschi and Virginia Ramponi Andreini

Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–c.1656) and Virginia Ramponi Andreini (c. 1583–1630/31) almost certainly met, and pictorial evidence suggests that Andreini — a commedia dell’arte actress and singer — posed for several Gentileschi paintings. The presence of Andreini within Gentileschi’s output marks an undeniable continuity between the strong female characters that populate their respective bodies of work. For both Andreini and Gentileschi, a signal place was accorded to the affective response of the betrayed woman. The ‘theatricality’ of seicento art is a trope reiterated so frequently as to be almost meaningless, yet these examples of an actual actress rendered in paint promise to illuminate the shared gestural and rhetorical ground of the two art forms. The fruits of such labour point in two directions: not only do these paintings reflect on Andreini’s theatrical practice, but Andreini’s comedic techniques provide a narrative context against which to read the drama of Gentileschi’s painted subjects, sidestepping common biographical interpretations.