Biographical Subject Research Articles

Amidst the Transforming Letters: The Biographical Subjectand The Biographical Hero in Józef Hen’s Ja, Michał z Montaigne...

The article analyzes the relationship between the biographical subject and the biographical hero in JózefHen’s novel Ja, Michał z Montaigne... (I, Michel de Montaigne...), demonstrating how the author incorporateshimself into the narrative of the French essayist’s life. The work highlights the duality of identity,where the thoughts of Montaigne and Hen intertwine, creating a shared narrative. Historical and literarycontexts help shape the character of Montaigne, and so do contemporary psychoanalytic theories. Henfi ctionalizes the biography, creating a space for the refl ection on subjectivity and authenticity in biographicalliterature, and his creative process opens up a dialogue between the author and his subject.

جی ایس داراکی کتاب ’’رسول عربیؐ ‘‘ کاتجزیاتی مطالعہ

Biography refers to describing the events of the Holy Prophet's life, his style of life and teachings. In every era, biographers wrote books on the life of the Holy Prophet. Biography began in early Islam. The appearance of those who picked up the pen on the subject of biography took place during the Prophet’s (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) biographers began to write in honor of him. This trend started in the subcontinent as well Apart from Muslim biographers in the subcontinent, non-Muslim biographers also entered this field. Among these biographers, two types of biographers emerged, one class was the one who was inspired by the teachings of the Holy Prophet (peace be upon him) and wrote out of love for the Prophet (peace be upon him) and the other class was the one who wrote against the Holy Prophet (peace be upon him) out of hatred for the Prophet (peace be upon him) due to jealousy. In such a situation, some non-Muslim biographers wrote moderately. Yes, I am. S. Dara is counted among the authentic biographers. He supported realism and in honor of him, he wrote in such a way that even Muslim biographers could not help but praise him. When a Muslim biographer writes on this subject, it is generally believed that he as a believer has given a positive account of the life of his beloved Prophet. But when a non-Muslim steps into this valley, a series of questions begin to arise. People start thinking that why did he, as a non-Muslim, write on the biography of the Messenger of Allah? Does his writing contain the fragrance of the Prophet's love or the poison of the Prophet's hatred?

Handling Hazardous Biographical Materials: Dealing with Questionable Character Traits through Poetic Biography

ABSTRACT As a (poetic) biographer who has dedicated considerable time to wading through archives and other research materials, I have often found myself wanting my biographical subjects to reveal themselves not only to be interesting, intelligent, accomplished, but to be ‘good people’ also, perhaps sharing my own artistic and political views of the world. Occasionally, however, I have been confronted with information that has stopped me short. And I have asked myself ‘How do I deal with that?’ Percy Grainger, for example, thought that blue-eyed composers were superior. And George Balanchine’s name is frequently associated with poor treatment of female dancers (though many have jumped to his defence). Of course, life stories are much more complex than a singular focus on such details will allow, and a biographer must consider all angles. As this article will discuss – through reference to my own work and that of other poets – I am interested in how poetry’s many affordances have enabled me to approach difficult material in ways that adequately distance my own moral judgement from the text and instead encourage a more active readerly engagement with facts and/or ambiguous information.

Myths, Media, and Judicial Execution: Writing the Biography of Hangman Robert Howard

Abstract Selecting a biographical subject is never straightforward. Inviting someone to live in your mind and soul for a few years is a complicated decision; even if you know your topic well, those early days of courtship can be difficult. Biographies, of course, allow for interesting segues into a variety of topics within the field of popular culture, including the competitive arena of true-crime storytelling. In this way, they are a potent lure for writers and readers who enjoy the ways genre-crossover books can present multiple stories within a single volume. This article explores a few of the approaches possible when writing historical biography and how these intersect with the complexities of presenting an executioner as a compelling, if controversial, figure. This is done through unpacking the process of writing the first full-length biography of Robert Howard, better known as “Nosey Bob,” the longest-serving hangman for New South Wales.

Posthumous Popularity; Fathoming Vincent van Gogh through Select Biofictions

This paper studies a few fictional representations of Vincent van Gogh in contemporary biofiction. The objective of this research is to analyse the life of a genius artist and his posthumous popularity by using the transmedia storytelling technique. Vincent Willem van Gogh, a Dutch painter who lived between 1853 and 1890, is widely regarded as one of the best exponents of post-impressionism. His eccentric life has been a perpetual obsession for creators to fictionally recreate him periodically after his disastrous end in the past hundred years. The paper captures three fictionalised biographical texts in the form of a novel, an animated movie and a documentary that transgress genre boundaries and renegotiate the relationship between historical facts and fiction. Throughout the 21st century, biographical materials, whether they are based on fact or fiction, have made significant contributions to this legend. The sources of the study pivot on three of van Gogh`s biofictions within film and literature; the novel Leaving van Gogh (2011) by Carol Wallace, the documentary Van Gogh: Painted with Words (2010) directed by Andrew Hutton and Loving Vincent (2017), a movie directed by Dorota Kobiela. The creators have taken artistic liberties by altering the stories with more engaging narratives as a way of rewriting the portrayal of the artist through fiction. Biofiction is a category of life writing that includes fictitious biographies and is typically a metafictional narrative in which a biographical subject is the protagonist or plays a significant role in the plot. Transmedia storytelling is an approach to integrating contemporary digital technology to communicate a cohesive narrative across several platforms and mediums. By utilising intermediary allusions and formal imitative techniques, van Gogh`s art, as well as the fundamental principles of artistic creation and his ubiquitous presence in contemporary times are explored.

Nested Narratives: Biographical Accounts of Unlived Experience Across Three Narrative Orders

Studies of narrative identity have focused on positive formation: stories of ‘becoming’ who we are because of events that happened, people we met, and things that we said, did, or had. However, identities can also be negatively defined by things that we miss, lose, choose against, or events that never happened. Drawing on the sociology of nothing, this paper explores some ways in which biographical subjects may story their unlived lives and paths to unbecoming. We demonstrate this by analysing the same extract of data through three interpretive lenses, revealing different narrative orders: the intrapersonal, intertextual, and performative. Respectively, these refer to how nothing is narrated: self-reflexively by the experiencing subject, regarding a particular instance; as a sequence of thematically connected episodes, contextually emplotted within a general life story; and as a communicative act of telling, directed towards an imagined audience. Authors can move between these narrative orders, taking different temporal perspectives and producing ‘nested’ stories of alternative non-selves.

Walking My Path Together with W. W. Phelps

Walking My Path Together with W. W. Phelps

Ibrāhīm Aḥmad’s The Guitar of Agatha Christie: Postcolonial and Biofictional Perspectives on Iraq’s Post-World War I Past and Post-2003 Present

In recent years, several anglophone biographical novels devoted to Agatha Christie have been published. Some of them focus on her 1926 disappearance in England, while others allude to this incident as a significant event from her past. The article investigates Iraqi author Ibrāhīm Aḥmad’s The Guitar of Agatha Christie (2016), an Arabic novel that tells the story of Christie’s disappearance in Baghdad in 1949. This novel is considered a postcolonial, postmodern and biographical novel in the article, and thus examined with reference to a number of studies on postcolonial fiction, biofiction and Genette’s narratology. Emphasis is placed on its narrative structure and “dual temporality”, a term introduced by Michael Lackey to describe how a biographical subject is employed in a narrative as a means for reflecting upon both his or her times and present-day reality. The article seeks answers to the question of how Aḥmad’s historical and cultural background impacts his vision of particular events in Christie’s life. The article concludes by identifying four diegetic and temporal levels in the novel that resembles a portmanteau narrative. Agatha Christie and the story of her disappearance serve as a pretext to discuss Iraq’s post-World War I past and post-2003 present. Several other stories are included in this narrative, all of which involve encounters between representatives of the East and the West.

Bauman: A Biography

Bauman: A Biography

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to This Issue: Comedy and Life Narratives

This introduction to the “Comic Lives” special issue of a/b examines the dynamic intersection of life narrative and humor. Picking up on a common theme in the contributors’ essays, the authors focus in particular on how comedians draw material for their comic performances from personal experiences of trauma and employ the rhetorical strategies of comedy to enact stealth testimony. They turn to the work of comedians such as Bo Burnham, Oliver Double, Hannah Gadsby, Hassan Minhaj, Thomas Ryan Red Corn and Sternlin Harjo, and Joe Wong to illustrate their discussion, and engage scholarship in comedy studies, persona studies, and celebrity studies to reflect on the affordances that comedy offers life narrative, the benefits and the risks of humor for auto|biographical subjects, and the capacities and limitations of the comic for resistance and counternarrative.

Screening Clara Schumann: Biomythography, Gender, and the Relational Biopic

Screening Clara SchumannBiomythography, Gender, and the Relational Biopic Julia Novak (bio) Clara Schumann, née Wieck, is known today as one of the most distinguished concert pianists of European Romanticism, a major influence on the development of the nineteenth-century piano recital, and a renowned piano teacher and composer.1 She is also remembered as one half of a famous musical couple, and as the subject of a secret romantic courtship and a spectacular legal dispute between her father and future husband. Clara began her career early as a wunderkind trained by her father Friedrich Wieck, and she fell in love with Robert Schumann at the age of sixteen. When Wieck opposed the match and slandered Schumann publicly, Schumann took him to court and finally obtained permission to marry Clara in 1840. The marriage lasted for sixteen years, until the end of Robert Schumann's life, during which Clara gave birth to eight children (one of whom died in infancy). In 1854, Robert Schumann was committed to an insane asylum following a suicide attempt, and he died there in 1856. Clara Schumann has been variously characterized as a devoted wife, mother of eight, and faithful curator of her husband's legacy, or depending on whom you ask, as a ruthless careerist and conservative impediment to her husband's genius—"that dreadful bitch Robert Schumann married" (Janice Galloway, qtd. in Novak 275). Like many other women who had been sidelined by androcentric music histories, she was resurrected by second-wave feminists in the 1980s and has since been turned into a cultural myth. From 1990 onwards, she was the face of the one-hundred deutschmark note. In 2019, the bicentenary of her birth, three major conferences were dedicated to Clara Schumann,2 as were numerous smaller events, concerts, newspaper articles, and radio features across the globe. Her life story has become highly mediated, narrated in biographies, letters, obituaries, concert programs, brochures of commemorative events, memorials, academic studies, documentaries,3 CD booklets, novels, and biographical motion pictures, or biopics. [End Page 1] In this essay, I focus on the four biopics made about the Schumanns: Träumerei (1944), Song of Love (1947), Frühlingssinfonie (1983), and Geliebte Clara (2008). In his landmark study of the biopic, George F. Custen reflects on the status of the genre as a form of life writing, concluding, "the fact that real names are used in biographical films suggests an openness to historical scrutiny and an attempt to present the film as the official story of a life" (8)—that is, as a form of biography. As such, the biopic is a medium that lays some claim to the authenticity of its narrative rather than presenting itself as fiction, even though it has license to stray from the historical facts.4 Dennis Bingham similarly frames the biopic as a form of biography, identifying the genre's "charge" as "enter[ing] the biographical subject into the pantheon of cultural mythology, one way or another, and to show why he or she belongs there" (10). That there is a strong gender dimension to the idea of biographical "worthiness" has long been a commonplace in biography studies. Narratives of women's lives are shaped by the standard paths and subject positions available to women at a given time. Drawing on gender-sensitive biography criticism and biopic studies, I will consider the four biographical motion pictures in relation to the Schumann "biomyth" as gendered manifestations of Clara Schumann's afterlife. Each film engages with the myth, sometimes confirming, sometimes contesting the image preserved of the subject in cultural memory. I will demonstrate not only how each film speaks to specific norms of femininity by appropriating and developing particular facets of the Schumann myth, but also how these shifts in Clara Schumann's cinematic representation are refracted through the changing conventions and possibilities of their medium. The Schumann Biomyth: Relational Biography and Gender In his reflections on Beethoven, Roland Barthes introduces—in passing—the notion of "bio-mythology" as a "system of meaning" that is created around a historical figure and serves as a totalizing explanation of the person's character, life, and work (149-154). Referring to Barthes's concept...

Narrating the Human and Singing the Sacred Song: Notes toward an Aesthetic of Biography

Drawing upon the theoretical writings of Tzvetan Todorov and Georg Lukács on the subject of the novel, this essay argues for more widespread recognition of the biography as a literary genre. It frames the genre of biography as a genre of radical incompleteness, discussing the search for verisimilitude and the tendency toward fragmentation in the biographer’s pursuit — a quality that describes not only the biographer’s sources, but also the contingent, broken nature of the intellectual and emotional space that both the biographical subject and the biographer herself inhabit.

Bartók, Biography, and the Violin

Abstract Biography takes the scant facts of a life that are available to scrutiny, like the waypoints on a journey to be mapped, and attempts to form a coherent narrative from them. That coherence is, to at least some degree, contingent upon the ideological position of the author and as Michael Benton has noted, “the biographical subject is a textual creation as much as a historical recreation.” While fully acknowledging that one cannot “read back” from the works of an author to their life, Benton has described the substance of literary outputs as “quasi-facts” to be set beside “historical facts” and argued that these “can be seen as reflecting some contemporary events or as sublimating some experiences in the writer’s past or mirroring some authorial state of mind.” This article draws on the First Violin Sonata as such a quasi-fact of Bartók’s life to question whether biographical information can or should impact the ways that we understand and perform his music. The article additionally considers whether the content of individual works as mental products may have something tangible to impart about their composer’s personality. Given the broad consensus around the so-called “Five-Factor Model” of personality measurement within the field of psychology, it speculates whether this might offer a tool to refine our portrait of Bartók through analysis of his music.

The Documentaries of Barbara Hammer: Lesbian Creativity, Kinship, and Erotic Pleasure in the Historical Margins

Abstract Lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer turned from experimental filmmaking to feature-length documentaries in the early 1990s. These late documentaries illustrate her distinct perspective on queer history and affect, which was influenced by 1970s lesbian feminism and queer scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s. Her structure and style in these films draw on the tools of both conventional historical documentaries and experimental film. Offering an astonishing range of evidence, Hammer creatively presents queer plenty from the margins of the archive. Through this evidence, Hammer affirms past queer lives, celebrating and highlighting rebelliousness, agency, creativity, queer kinship, and passion. Additionally, Hammer attempts to communicate with and embody the past, physically and emotionally seeking out and feeling the interior and exterior lives of her biographical subjects, who are predominantly creative women, including the poet Elizabeth Bishop, the Dada artist Hannah Höch, the surreal photographer Claude Cahun, and the painter Nicole Eisenman.

‘Mattering’ Women’s Lives on Screen: An Introduction

The aim of this introduction is to provide a context for the articles that follow in this cluster on Women’s Lives on Screen. Starting with some reflections on how biopics can matter to audiences, I propose the use of ‘mattering’ as a concept for the study of women’s biopics which helps consider their objectification of women as biographical ‘material’ on screen in tandem with their emancipatory refiguring of women as biographical subjects that are made to matter. The introduction also offers a brief overview of biopic studies as they relate to the subject of women’s lives on screen. It ends by sketching the breadth of topics covered in this cluster with a summary of the eleven articles.

Lives within Lives: Plutarch's “Life” of Perseus

Abstract This article examines Plutarch's treatment of Perseus of Macedonia in the Life of Aemilius and argues that Perseus is a secondary biographical subject. By directing our attention to aspects of the king's birth and death, as well as his central moral traits, outstanding ancestors, and responses to changes in fortune, Plutarch integrates Perseus fully into the moral themes of the Aemilius-Timoleon. Aemilius, in his meetings with the king, reflects upon him as Plutarch suggests he himself studies his biographical subjects in the prologue to the pair, becoming a model reader of the Lives.

Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. By Nicholas A. Basbanes

Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. By Nicholas A. Basbanes

Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Harold Nicolson and the Aesthetics of the Subject in the New Biography

The New Biography emerged in the 1920s and 1930s under the impulse of Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and Harold Nicolson. Although their appreciation of each other varied, these writers read and influenced each other’s work; they formulated similar conceptualisations of biography, giving strength to Woolf’s idea of a ‘new school of biographies’ (Woolf 1927, 475). In recent years, researchers such as Max Saunders and Laura Marcus have asserted the importance of the New Biography in understanding and reassessing the status of auto/biographical forms in modernist texts. This paper seeks to show that the New Biography developed a specific aesthetics of the biographical subject, contributing to the politics of the modernist self in the early twentieth century. I argue that this aesthetics is mainly motivated by the centrality of personality and the necessarily subjective perception of that personality. In these narratives, personality is the main plot device, driving the story forward, and providing a rationale for the life trajectory. It is a common practice to define the modernist self in terms of its de-centredness and its fragmented nature, and this clarifies why the New Biographers sought to find techniques that create oblique and blurred visualisations of their subjects. Visuality, in this paper, concerns perspective and the biographer’s staging of the performance of perception, as mirrored in the eyes of secondary subjects, and in those of the biographer him/herself. Anchoring my study to the theories of historian and philosopher Frank Ankersmit on the assessment of truth in historical representations, I argue that this mirror effect is used by the New Biographers to highlight the constructedness of all visions of the subject. This subsequently subverts the reliability of the narrative, but also accounts for the artistic dimension of the biography, and intensifies the complex interconnections between literature and historiography.

Россия в лицах: языковые средства создания образа страны в американской энциклопедистике

The paper aims to reveal the peculiarities of Russia’s image representation in the English-language encyclopedic reference. The researcher estimates the level of representation of the Russian anthroponyms in the macrostructure of the encyclopedia under consideration, reveals compilers’ attitude towards the biographical subjects that is manifested in the choice of facts presented and linguistic means used. Scientific originality of the study lies in the fact that the researcher identifies components of Russia’s image in the American encyclopedic edition and compiles a list of the lexemes most frequently used to describe the Russian reality. The conducted research allows concluding that the use of pejorative vocabulary in the conceptual blocks “State System”, “Women’s Status”, “Social Injustice”, “Repressions” creates a controversial image of Russia.

Reading Polly Teale’s Dog Women in After Mrs Rochester and Brontë

ABSTRACT Playwright and director Polly Teale’s biodramas After Mrs Rochester (2003) and Brontë (2005) boldly feature dog women to embody the psychological shadows of Jean Rhys and Charlotte Brontë respectively. In developing the figures Teale draws inspiration most explicitly from artist Dame Paula Rego’s Dog Woman series (1994) and Charlotte Brontë’s blurring of the species boundary human/animal in her representation of Bertha Mason Rochester in Jane Eyre (1847). The intersections between the aesthetics of Teale and Rego provide, I show, a critical frame within which to read their dog women. To weigh Teale’s treatment of her biographical subjects, intimacy and the relation between sexuality and writing I also draw out the scope of her engagement with canine images in Rhys’s fiction and a letter Brontë wrote to Constantin Héger.