In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 171-173 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding, by David Ellis; ix & 195 pp. New York: Routledge, 2000, $35. In his discussion of biography as a form, Ellis points to his study as a response to the scarcity of "monographs on biography... and [that] none of (...) them are particularly satisfactory" (p. 2). He further points out that "the comparative dearth of analytic enquiry into biography is surprising" (p. 3). In short, his first pages get off to a rocky start in their tatty justification of a critical study. Though a critic of D. H. Lawrence, Ellis uses the English writer sparingly, pointing out in his "Preface" what he feels is a need "to keep illustration involving Lawrence to a decent minimum" (p. viii) while concentrating on those problems which face the biographer. That said, he sets about to characterize biography as an integration of "a disinterested enthusiasm for information... [fashioning a]... compelling story in which many details with no direct relevance to the life of his subject can be considered as contributing successfully to a period atmosphere" (p. 35). Ellis is thinking specifically of Norman Sherry's biography of Graham Greene through which he has brought to the discussion his intent of pointing to an approach which concerns itself with chapters on "Ancestors," "Primal Scenes," "Body Matters," "the Sociological [End Page 171] Imagination," "History, Chance and Self-determination," "Compatibility, Sartre and Long Biographies." All are aspects of biography.As well as the approach he suggests by these areas of concentration, Ellis draws broadly from many subjects of biography, always keeping a critical eye on its form. Anne Stevenson's approach "is towards psychological determinism" (p. 135); Ackroyd in his biography of Dickens raises "through a degree of intellectual play" the questions of when "lineage" is appropriate, that is, the extent to which it has any productive consequence. He also uses Hawthorne and Virginia Woolf as examples. Writing of the role of the historian raises difficulties for writers creating biographies from such an early period as that of Chaucer; Ellis points to Derek Pearsall's "excellent Life of Geoffrey Chaucer" (p. 121).Ellis neither can nor should ignore Lawrence and what better chapter to include him in than "Body Matters" in its concentration on illness. Here Ellis draws on Lawrence's concern with the harm of his health on his work (p. 78). He also considers Flaubert, Sartre, and Woolf. Briefly he mentions Stendhal's imagination of his "future audience" after his death (p. 109), sensibly rejects the long ago depleted and so, parenthetically, apparently permanent speculation on what Keats's might have become had he lived a full life "in a time of drugs for treatment of tuberculosis" (p. 123) and the equally mined issue of what prompted Hemingway's suicide (pp. 132-33). Certainly he is aware of the danger that such a use of material may pander to the pleasure of mere name-hunters (what if there were no index!). At the same time, if the effect of his range of examples invites additions of our own, while keeping before us that his study is about biography as form, it is successful.In "Primal Scenes," the fourth chapter of his book, Ellis gives what he feels is necessary space to Freud, the creator of the term. He points to Wordsworth's "spots of time" as only one indication of the difficulty--if not impossibility--of capturing biographically those moments in childhood by which the individual written about might be defined (p. 57). (Such an impossibility should not be surprising to those of us readers who recognize the nearly impossible task for ourselves in our own lives.) Surely both the biographer and autobiographer share this ignorance and frustration. In a very interesting move, Ellis points to Compton Mackenzie's discussion of a critical event in his six-year old life surrounding the interruption of an Easter evening with his parents and siblings, interrupted by the arrival of friends. Ellis writes... (shrink)

Written by one of the world's preeminent authorities on Kierkegaard, this 2001 biography was the first to reveal the delicate imbrication of Kierkegaard's life and thought. To grasp the importance and influence of Kierkegaard's thought far beyond his native Denmark, it is necessary to trace the many factors that led this gifted but 'exceedingly childish youth' to grapple with traditional philosophical problems and religious themes in a way that later generations would recognize as amounting to a philosophical revolution. This book (...) offers a powerful narrative account which will be of particular interest to philosophers, literary theorists, intellectual historians, and scholars of religious studies as well as any non-specialist looking for an authoritative guide to the life and work of one of the most original and fascinating figures in Western philosophy. (shrink)

Written by one of the world's preeminent authorities on Kierkegard, this biography is the first to reveal the delicate imbrication of Kierkegard's life and thought. To grasp the importance and influence of Kierkegaard's thought far beyond his native Denmark, it is necessary to trace the many factors that led this gifted but (according to his headmaster) 'exceedingly childish youth' to grapple with traditional philosophical problems and religious themes in a way that later generations would recognize as amounting to a philosophical (...) revolution. Although Kierkegaard's works are widely tapped and cited they are seldom placed in context. Nor is due attention placed to their chronology. However, perhaps more than the work of any other contributor to the Western philosophical tradition, these writings are so closely meshed with the background and details of the author's life that knowledge of this is indispensible to their content. Alastair Hannay solves these problems by following the chronological sequence of events and focusing on the formative stages of his career from the success of his first, pseudonymous work ^Either/Or through to The Sickness Unto Death and Practice in Christianity. This book offers a powerful narrative account which will be of particular interest to philosophers, literary theorists, intellectual historians, and scholars of religious studies as well as any non-specialist looking for an authoritative guide to the life and work of one of the most original and fascinating figures in Western philosophy. Alastair Hannay is Professor Emeritus in the department of philosophy at the University of Oslo. He is the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion of Kierkegaard (1998) and is also translator of several works by Kierkegaard in Penguin Classics. (shrink)

In this brief and incisive book, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills tells the story of the Confessions--what motivated Augustine to dictate it, how it asks to be read, and the many ways it has been misread in the one-and-a-half millennia since it was composed. Following Wills's biography of Augustine and his translation of the Confessions, this is an unparalleled introduction to one of the most important books in the Christian and Western traditions. Understandably fascinated by the story of Augustine's life, (...) modern readers have largely succumbed to the temptation to read the Confessions as autobiography. But, Wills argues, this is a mistake. The book is not autobiography but rather a long prayer, suffused with the language of Scripture and addressed to God, not man. Augustine tells the story of his life not for its own significance but in order to discern how, as a drama of sin and salvation leading to God, it fits into sacred history. "We have to read Augustine as we do Dante," Wills writes, "alert to rich layer upon layer of Scriptural and theological symbolism." Wills also addresses the long afterlife of the book, from controversy in its own time and relative neglect during the Middle Ages to a renewed prominence beginning in the fourteenth century and persisting to today, when the Confessions has become an object of interest not just for Christians but also historians, philosophers, psychiatrists, and literary critics. With unmatched clarity and skill, Wills strips away the centuries of misunderstanding that have accumulated around Augustine's spiritual classic. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual BiographyBruce KuklickDavid S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual BiographyChicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. xxiv+291 pp. Notes, Bibliographic Essay, Sources, Students of Richard Hofstadter, Index. $27.50.In the mid-twentieth century Richard Hofstadter was one the finest historians of the United States. Uncommitted to work in primary sources, he was perhaps not at the level of Perry Miller, Vann Woodward, and Edmund Morgan. But Hofstadter (...) had a greater range and wider influence than these men, and the combination of intellectual and political history that he wrote was unique, as was the penetration of his intellect and his appealing sensibility.Hofstadter was born in Buffalo, New York, the son of a Lutheran mother and a father who was a secular Jew. The son went to the local University of Buffalo. While not as impoverished as this biography is inclined to make him, Dick Hofstadter "married up" after he fell in love with Felice Swados, the daughter of a Buffalo Jewish doctor who was also a student at the University. Swados introduced Hofstadter to the Marxist intellectual left of the 1930s, although he was himself a successful and intelligent student leader. In the years after their graduation, the couple had a tempestuous start to their marriage, but over the next several years they built a life in New York City. Felice became the medical columnist for Time; Dick productively completed a doctoral degree in history at Columbia University. They both continued their radical activities. In the late 1930s he was briefly a member of the American Communist Party, although Dick quickly resigned because of the authoritarian nature of the organization. Even then, however, he was more removed and skeptical than Felice, with more of an historian's impartiality and sense of the tragic. Felice's unambiguous commitments moved him, but Dick was, literally, only half-inclined to the Jewish left.Swados died of cancer in 1945, after they had moved to Washington, D.C., where Hofstadter was teaching at the University of Maryland. But a year later the devastated young man obtained a position at Columbia. At the same time he met and married Beatrice Kevitt, another capable woman with literary and editorial talent.In 1948 Hofstadter published what I still think is his masterwork, The American Political Tradition. A series of sharp portraits of leading politicians, [End Page 574] the book owed much to Hofstadter's leftist background. It was indebted to Marxist analyses, or at least to those of the sort promulgated by the great historian, Charles Beard, who saw economics as central to the study of national life. But Hofstadter did not see a clash between capitalists and their opponents in the United States. He viewed the entire tradition of American politicians as committed to a certain kind of exploitative social system, although his book did not quite have the edge suggested by this last phrase. Hofstadter became known as a "consensus" historian who had a monolithic sense of the American experience, although this monolith was not benign as was that of other practitioners of consensus.In the 1950s Hofstadter, now a prominent Columbia faculty member, moved away from some of the economic preconceptions of The American Political Tradition. Instead, in his two other important books, The Age of Reform (1955) and The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965), he brought to bear on the American experience a group of concepts that he took from his study of the social sciences. Overall, these two books undermined his previous materialist interpretation of politics. Instead, Hofstadter found that irrational fears, psychological maladjustments, and concerns about status might motivate leaders and movements more than a rational appraisal of self-interest. In retrospect, this 1950s social science does not appear very enlightening, and so Hofstadter's absorption of it is not to be praised. On the other side, so many of his fellow historians attacked him for his interdisciplinary bent that his generous outreach looks more than daring. Hofstadter's own personal politics shifted, too. He became a staunch if critical defender of the social democratic liberalism of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and its impulses in the 1950s and 1960s.In... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reframing Baudelaire: Literary History, Biography, Postcolonial Theory, and Vernacular LanguagesFrançoise Lionnet* (bio)In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf quips: “History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men;” literary history, she might have added, is too much about sons murdering their fathers. Canonical readings of the canon have often insisted on the vaguely Freudian (if not biblical) model of literary creation susceptible (...) both to “anxieties of influence” and to creative revisions imposed by strong misreadings. Criticism has followed the same reactive pattern in order to clear new ground for further research: the debate between “traditionalists” and proponents of “cultural studies” all but repeats this familiar and combative dialectic. Between formalist and sociopolitical readings, French texts have been mined by many different critical trends; but the perspectives that do not fit neatly into one or the other of these agonistic moves tend to be left out. Dominick LaCapra has suggested that “one issue for readers today is whether a different, ‘noncanonical’ reading of the canon, which resists symbolic resolutions as well as narrowly formalistic interpretations, may be one force in reopening texts to the[ir] broader sociopolitical effects” [731].In the case of Baudelaire, the way to do this “noncanonical” reading might well be to go back to a discursive field which includes biography and oral histories, and to resist the temptation either to eulogize the innovations of the poet of modernity or to denounce the patent racism of his images. The challenge today is to return to the scene of writing and the conditions of production of the early poetry—in other words, to look at the text from outside of conventional literary, critical or cultural history, to reclaim it for our side, that of a more global francophonie. To do so might mean to map out once again the contested terrain of culturally and politically sensitive readings such as the ones Christopher Miller and Gayatri Spivak claim to do. Their readings, however, do not take into account the residual cultural element of the poetry, that is, the vernacular language it appropriates. This language is all but buried beneath the emergent theoretical practices of postcolonial criticism and its vaguely nationalist agendas. 1 Critics have tended to look for [End Page 63] symbolic resolutions and to settle cultural scores at the expense of historical and geographical specificity, despite claims to the contrary.The facts of Baudelaire’s youthful travels in the Indian Ocean have remained relatively obscure. While doing research in the islands of Mauritius and Réunion on two separate occasions during the past few years, I came across written documents and watercolors that helped me reconstruct the historical and visual contexts that appear to have been Baudelaire’s in 1841. By re-examining the criticisms that have been lodged against the exoticizing rhetoric of his poetry, I want to foreground the links between the Creole culture with which Baudelaire became familiar and the now canonical texts he produced. These links can allow us to bypass the sterile opposition between “literary studies” and “cultural studies” or between aesthetics and politics; they demonstrate the urgency of re-visioning the canon not just from the perspectives of its margins, but as an important source of muted cultural knowledge. The questions with which I begin, then, are the following: where did Baudelaire actually go on his travels in 1841? and why does this matter to the field of French studies?Il faut en finir avec la légende de l’Inde parcourue par Baudelaire. Elle était séduisante, Gautier l’a adoptée, Banville ne l’a pas négligée.... Mais la vérité vraie est que Baudelaire, embarqué malgré lui, brûla la politesse à l’Inde.... Peut-être Baudelaire abandonnait-il complaisamment au commun public ces bruits de longues pérégrinations en pays fabuleux, parce qu’il en tirait, avec des couleurs de mystère, l’air de revenir de loin. Dans tous les cas, il ne nous parlait jamais de ces voyages. A peine, à son retour, nous dit-il quelques mots d’une station dans l’île Maurice ou l’île Bourbon. 2[It is time to put a stop to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.3 (2005) 44-57 [Access article in PDF] Literary Biography: The Cinderella of Literary Studies Michael Benton There are no prizes for guessing who are the two ugly sisters: Criticism, the elder one, dominated literary studies for the first half of the twentieth century; theory, her younger sister, flounced to the fore in the second half. Meanwhile, 'Cinders,' who had been doing (...) the chores for centuries, has been magically transformed in recent times, decked out in new clothes by Richard Holmes, Claire Tomalin, Juliet Barker, Peter Ackroyd et al., and, as the millennium approached, celebrated and admired on all sides. At the start of the new century, literary biography remains in vogue. The bibliography that carries it forward is rolling, and there is no sign of it turning into a pumpkin. Why is Cinderella so popular?One obvious if superficial answer might be that literary biography is where literary people go who find the contemporary preoccupation with theory to be personally undernourishing and critically unenlightening; they would rather stay with the literary works themselves and with the lives, the minds, and the times that produced them. Yet it is not only literary biography that is thriving; life writing in general is the fastest-growing area of mainstream publishing, evidence for which can be seen in Waterstone's flagship store in London's Piccadilly, which devotes its prime ground-floor site to thousands of biographies. This commercial high profile is responding to an evident, if unfocused, need to look at other lives and understand them. Individual reasons for the popularity of biography range from prurient interest and hero worship to a, perhaps unrecognized, search for coherence and purpose in an age that is often disinclined either to accept institutional values or to respect traditional authority. The motives for this search usually include the desire for recognizable success, to which end the invention of a convincing identity is essential. Biographies offer models of how others live, face challenges, and cope with change; they are prime sites for studying ourselves. Curiously, this justification for biography as providing [End Page 44] a model for living was felt most strongly when this literary genre first emerged in the eighteenth century. The difference today is that the model has changed: Biography as a moral exemplum based upon Christian principles has been replaced in today's celebrity culture by the demand for models of success provided by public personalities. Nonetheless, whatever the range of satisfactions readers seek in biography, life writing offers, in one form or another, detailed pictures of widely different ways of living and amid these, perhaps, some clues to how an individual sense of identity might be shaped.Literary biographies (i.e., biographies of writers, not biographies with a particular literary quality) are a significant and, in some respects, a unique subgenre since they purport to offer access to the creative imagination. They have a long and distinguished history from Johnson and Boswell to the present day; they are sometimes written by other novelists (Elizabeth Gaskell on Charlotte Bronte, Peter Ackroyd on Dickens); and autobiographical writing may take the form of poetry (Wordsworth) or fiction (Joyce).1 Furthermore recent writing in this field has increasingly introduced elements of metabiography in books by Adam Sisman2 and Lucasta Miller.3 It is evident, therefore, that literary biography offers a rich and varied area of study that raises issues about the relationships among biography, history, fiction, and poetry that are fundamental to aesthetic education.Yet despite this promise, it has become a truism to declare that biography has failed to establish any theoretical foundations upon which to build. Backscheider quotes Ira Nadel's remark on the absence of "a sustained theoretical discussion of biography incorporating some of the more probing and original speculations about language, structure, and discourse that have dominated post-structuralist thought."4 She goes on to lament the poverty of criticism; the absence of a cultivated readership; the failure to engage even with the practical questions of selection, organization, or presentation; and indicates that readers of biography are too easily... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Critical Theory's Attack on Biography The Attack from within Literary Criticism Distinguishing a Category of Relevant Biographical Information Biographical Information as an Aid to Understanding Biographical Information as an Aid to Appreciation Biographical Information as an Integral Part of Appreciation Conclusion.

Biography is an ancient literary genre. First of all—chronologically and logically it is a part of historiography. Whether we think of biography as more like history or more like fiction, what we want from it is a vivid sense of the person. The cover illustration of the fortieth anniversary edition of E. H. Carr’s What is History?1 is a close-up of an eye with fluffy white clouds against a blue iris and a dramatic black pupil in the center. Magritte (...) called this painting The False Mirror, an apt image for the untrustworthy nature of our perceptions of the world and, in its use here, for the uncertainties surrounding definitions of history in the past half century. Confusion has often accompanied.. (shrink)

Essays on British philosophers engaged with philosophical topics and used methods that were both different from and continuous with those that were taken up by British philosophers of the next two centuries. Major focus on the influence of Francis Bacon, who launched the era's most influential British attack on the traditional theories and practices of philosophy itself offering an alternative vision of a profoundly different and more powerful form of philosophy.

Although many people find fault with Freud, the horse that they flog is not yet dead. I should in fact maintain that we are all still under Freud's long shadow. Last autumn the American press reported a dreadful crime: a young man, egged on by his mother, murdered his father. The newspapers helpfully explained that the young man had a very prominent Oedipus complex. If we dismiss this as just a journalistic excess, we would do well to remember how hard (...) it is to open our own mouths without registering the effect of Freud upon the language. We converse casually about the sexual proclivities of infants, about sibling rivalries, about dependency upon the mother, about sadomasochistic impulses. When we forget things, we suspect ourselves of having wanted to forget them. We may shun the technical vocabulary of Freud, words such as ego, superego, id, the pleasure principle and the reality principle, the anal, oral, and genital stages, yet we are hardly likely to do without such words as aggression, anxiety, compulsion, the unconscious, defense mechanism, narcissism, death wish, erogenous zones, fixation, guilt feeling, sublimation, wish fulfillment. Freud may not have invented most of these words, yet he connected them together and he gave them a special color and shape. And quite apart from terminology, Freud has given us the conviction that a secret life is going on within us that is only partly under our control. (shrink)

Essays in Arabic Literary Biography, 925–1350. Edited by Terri DeYoung and Mary St. Germain. Mîzân: Studien zur Literatur in der islamischen Welt, vol. 17,1. Wiesbaden: haRRaSSoWitz, 2011. Pp. vii + 371. €68.

Essays on the philosophical thinkers who lived between the end of the Roman Empire, circa 400, and the beginning of the modern era, circa 1490.

By way of essays and a selection of primary sources in parallel text, Biography, Historiography, and Modes of Philosophizing provides an introduction to a vast, significant, but neglected corpus of early modern literature: collective biography. It focuses especially on the various related strands of political, philosophical, and intellectual and cultural biography as well as on the intersection between biography, historiography, and philosophy. Individual texts from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century are presented as examples of how the ancient collective biographical (...) tradition--as represented above all by Plutarch, Suetonius, Diogenes Laertius, and Jerome--was received and transformed in the Renaissance and beyond in accordance with the needs of humanism, religious controversy, politics, and the development of modern philosophy and science"--Provided by publisehr. (shrink)

While historiography is dominated by attempts that try to standardize and de-individualize the behavior of animals, history proves to be littered with records of the exceptional lives of unusual animals. This book introduces animal biography as an approach to the re-framing of animals as both objects of knowledge as well as subjects of individual lives. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective and bringing together scholars from, among others, literary, historical and cultural studies, the texts collected in this volume seek to refine (...) animal biography as a research method and framework to studying, capturing, representing and acknowledging animal others as individuals. From Heini Hediger's biting monitor, Hachikō and Murr to celluloid ape Caesar and the mourning of Topsy's gruesome death, the authors discuss how animal biographies are discovered and explored through connections with humans that can be traced in archives, ethological fieldwork and novels, and probe the means of constructing animal biographies from taxidermy to film, literature and social media. Thus, they invite deeper conversations with socio-political and cultural contexts that allow animal biographies to provide narratives that reach beyond individual life stories, while experimenting with particular forms of animal biographies that might trigger animal activism and concerns for animal well-being, spur historical interest and enrich the literary imagination. (shrink)

For some time it has been fashionable in literary circles to reject what is called scornfully the biographical method. It was inevitable. No mode lasts forever. Sooner or later, there is a change. This method was the law for too long. It had no rival. Under its tutelage the motto for teaching literature was “the man, his work”. It was by its authority that students were taught that La Fontaine was in charge of waterways and forests and master of (...) the hunt before writing his Fables, that they had to learn by heart; or that Beaumarchais had been a clockmaker, musician, secret agent and business man before inventing the character of Figaro, proposed for their admiration. There has been a reaction. Our irreverent and contentious age has put an end to that absolute sovereignty. For a good quarter of a century this practice and the assumptions on which it rests has been on trial, in the name of the various and at times even contradictory conceptions and theories about the nature of literature. These have in common, however, the belief in the independence of literature with regard to the human being who was the instrument of its creation, as well as the anathema cast by this fact on what is commonly accepted as “referential illusion”. (shrink)

Biography is one of the most popular categories of books—and indeed the most popular category among nonfiction books, according to one British poll. Thus, biography offers historians of science an opportunity to reach a potentially broad audience. This essay examines approaches typical of different genres of scientific biography, including historians’ motivations in their choices of biographical subject and their decisions about strategies for reconstruction of the biographical life. While historians of science often use biography as a vehicle (...) to analyze scientific processes and scientific culture, the most compelling scientific biographies are ones that portray the ambitions, passions, disappointments, and moral choices that characterize a scientist’s life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reading BiographyMichael Benton (bio)Biographer, Biography, and the ReaderBiography is a hybrid. It is history crossed with narrative. The biographer has to present the available facts of the life yet shape their arbitrariness, untidiness, and incompleteness into an engaging whole. The readerly appeal lies in the prospect both of gaining documentary information, scrupulously researched and plausibly interpreted, and of experiencing the aesthetic pleasure of reading a well-made work of art (...) with a continuous life story and a satisfying closure. "In the family of literature," one of its most respected practitioners asserts, "biography seems to be the product of a strange coupling between old-fashioned history and the traditional novel."1 The invitation of biography is thus a dualistic one; the aesthetic experience it offers stems from the twofoldness of its nature and from the stance that this imposes upon the reader. Literary biographies of poets and novelists offer a particularly fruitful area of study since their subjects have a special concern for aesthetic experience and the biographers' main interest lies in the relationship between the life and the works. Though much of what follows has a wider application, the focus of this article is on biographies of writers. By triangulating the roles of the biographer, the biographee within the biographical text, and the reader we can conceptualize the elements that make up the invitation of the genre.First, the biographer. Richard Holmes characterizes the process he experiences with two keywords: it is a "pursuit" and it is a "haunting." They are two sides of the same phenomenon. The pursuit is a "tracking of the physical trail of someone's path through the past, a following of footsteps," an effort "to write about the pursuit of that fleeting figure in such a way as to bring it alive in the present."2 The haunting occurs when this revivification succeeds and the biographee is brought imaginatively alive. Then the biographer turns from pursuer to pursued. While the subject does not take [End Page 77] him over, as it might in some Gothic fantasy, it does exercise the power of the past upon the present and haunt the biographer's imagination. Holmes goes on to explain the two main elements as "closely entwined strands":The first is the gathering of factual materials, the assembling in chronological order of a man's "journey" through the world—the actions, the words, the recorded thoughts, the places and faces through which he moved: the "life and letters." The second is the creation of a fictional or imaginary relationship between the biographer and his subject; not merely a "point of view" or an "interpretation," but a continuous living dialogue between the two... It is fictional, imaginary, because of course the subject cannot really, literally, talk back; but the biographer must come to act and think of his subject as if he can.3Not every biographer would necessarily subscribe to this particular description, but there is ample evidence in the recent spate of books about the genre4 that the biographer's capacity for imaginative empathy is continuously interacting with the verifiable historical data. The present operates upon the past in other ways, too. Earlier biographers who are more or less contemporary with their subjects (for example, Boswell, Forster, Mrs. Gaskell)5 stand in different relationships with them and the available data about them compared with present-day biographers who may inherit a whole bibliography of "lives" laid down in stratified layers on top of the life they are trying to recover. The modern reader, like the modern biographer, has to be a literary archaeologist. Dickens's "lives," for example, are constructed on a bedrock of his friend Forster's biography and on the novelist's own writings, neither of which subsequent biographers can afford to ignore. Later "lives" also have to be sifted through: our inherited Dickens is compounded from a series of accounts from, among a host of others, the Victorian memoirs of his daughter6 and his reading manager,7 via Edwardian enthusiasts8 and 1930s revelations about Dickens's private life,9 to those of modern academics and writers in our own time.10 In such cases, bringing the subject... (shrink)

The famous Russian historian V. O. Kluchevsky had been constantly interested in literature. In this article, the author considers Kluchevsky’s observations on M. Yu. Lermontov’s creativity through the analyses of sadness motives in the article ‘Sadness‘ published in the journal ‘Russian Thought‘. Kluchevsky tried to understand how sadness motives were appeared in the Russian literature and how these motives influenced Lermontov’s self-reflection. Literary analyses is constructed on famous Lermontov’s lyrics, such as ‘Sail‘, ‘The golden cloud slept…‘, ‘Dream‘ and ‘July (...) the 11th of 1831‘. Analyzing the lyrics ‘I go out alone on the road…‘ the author of this article paying attention to ‘hidden sadness‘, which is expressed impressively in melodious Lermontov’s lyric without ‘arrangement for notes‘. Kluchevsky had expressed it on the 50th anniversary of Lermontov’s death. The position of the historian reflected in his comparison of sad Lermontov with meek and devout Russian tsar Alexey Mikhailovich. For this comparison, he was reproached by writer and literary critic N. M. Mikhailovsky, but Kluchevsky thoroughly considered sadness motives in poet’s creativity based on examples from the lyrics and disagreed literary critic’s reproaches. The origins of sadness motives studied in the historian’s article are in lesser degree connected with the biography of young Lermontov and rooted in the ‘moral history‘ of all Russian society. (shrink)

Literary Forms of Argument in Early China examines the functions of rhetorical markers and devices as well as the patterns and larger modes structuring various styles of early Chinese argumentation. The nine contributors to the volume each present tight analyses of specific compositional or literary aspects of persuasion, hoping to demonstrate how an unabashed focus on the formal elements of philosophical writing might come to the aid of, or even more drastically alter and transform, philosophical interpretation. The volume (...) includes essays by the following nine scholars, who are at once a mixture of philologists, textual and literary specialists, and intellectual historians: Rudolph Wagner, Andrew Plaks, David... (shrink)

The biographies of animal celebrities published by the historians John Simons and Eric Baratay aim to place animals in and of themselves at the center of academic narratives. Both excavate the lived experiences concealed behind official discourses and collective representations, notably by relying on cross-fertilization with ethological research. They unveil the ways in which information was reshaped in order to portray animal celebrities as benevolent members of human-animal communities, and thereby shed light on the mechanics of animal commodification. The (...) close examination of a few individual animal trajectories enlightens the condition of many historical animals living under human tutelage in the 19th and early 20th century and highlights long-term historical evolutions, such as the succession of animal cultures and generations largely determined by human actions. (shrink)

Before her death in 1673, Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, expressed a wish that her philosophical work would experience a ‘glorious resurrection’ in future ages. During her lifetime, and for almost three centuries afterwards, her writings were destined to ‘lye still in the soft and easie Bed of Oblivion’. But more recently, Cavendish has received a measure of the fame she so desired. She is celebrated by feminists, literary theorists, and historians. There are regular conferences organised by (...) the International Margaret Cavendish Society, and there have been several biographies, as well as essay collections, journal issues, scholarly editions, and anthologies devoted to her work. In terms of studies in the history and philosophy of science, however, Cavendish has yet to achieve her resurrection in full. While there have been journal articles and book chapters, and a 2001 edition of her Observations, there have been (until now) no book-length studies of her philosophy, and there is currently no modern edition of her other major work, the Philosophical Letters. This essay-length review of Lisa Sarasohn’s The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish highlights why Cavendish should still hold interest for philosophers today. (shrink)

Friedrich von Hayek’s Unfinished Draft of a Sketch of a Biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein was the first attempt at the task of assembling a comprehensible picture of the life of his pre-eminent cousin, Ludwig Wittgenstein. As the title might suggest, von Hayek never finished this task, his efforts being stymied by both Wittgenstein’s literary executors and Wittgenstein’s sister, Margaret Stonborough. Here, and for the first time, Christian Erbacher presents the first real publication of this draft, with accompanying commentary, and (...) an afterword by Allan Janik. Perhaps the best way to describe Erbacher’s work here is as a ‘biography of a biography’. His introduction to von Hayek’s manuscript details the story behind its creation, beginning with an outline of von Hayek’s own relationship with Wittgenstein, and the parallels between their academic careers. In doing so, Erbacher not only also describes the history of von Hayek’s sketch, but also the history of Wittgenstein-biography as a genre in itself. For what emerges from Erbacher’s extensive work in researching the von Hayek sketch is that, despite never coming to fruition itself, the work that von Hayek put into collecting the materials for writing a biography of Wittgenstein was hugely influential in all future endeavours of chronicling Wittgenstein’s life. (shrink)

This biography of Jacques Derrida tells the story of a Jewish boy from Algiers, excluded from school at the age of twelve, who went on to become the most widely translated French philosopher in the world – a vulnerable, tormented man who, throughout his life, continued to see himself as unwelcome in the French university system. We are plunged into the different worlds in which Derrida lived and worked: pre-independence Algeria, the microcosm of the École Normale Supérieure, the cluster of (...) structuralist thinkers, and the turbulent events of 1968 and after. We meet the remarkable series of leading writers and philosophers with whom Derrida struck up a friendship: Louis Althusser, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean Genet, and Hélène Cixous, among others. We also witness an equally long series of often brutal polemics fought over crucial issues with thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, John R. Searle, and Jürgen Habermas, as well as several controversies that went far beyond academia, the best known of which concerned Heidegger and Paul de Man. We follow a series of courageous political commitments in support of Nelson Mandela, illegal immigrants, and gay marriage. And we watch as a concept – deconstruction – takes wing and exerts an extraordinary influence way beyond the philosophical world, on literary studies, architecture, law, theology, feminism, queer theory, and postcolonial studies. In writing this compelling and authoritative biography, Benoît Peeters talked to over a hundred individuals who knew and worked with Derrida. He is also the first person to make use of the huge personal archive built up by Derrida throughout his life and of his extensive correspondence. Peeters’ book gives us a new and deeper understanding of the man who will perhaps be seen as the major philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century. (shrink)

This biography of Jacques Derrida tells the story of a Jewish boy from Algiers, excluded from school at the age of twelve, who went on to become the most widely translated French philosopher in the world – a vulnerable, tormented man who, throughout his life, continued to see himself as unwelcome in the French university system. We are plunged into the different worlds in which Derrida lived and worked: pre-independence Algeria, the microcosm of the École Normale Supérieure, the cluster of (...) structuralist thinkers, and the turbulent events of 1968 and after. We meet the remarkable series of leading writers and philosophers with whom Derrida struck up a friendship: Louis Althusser, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean Genet, and Hélène Cixous, among others. We also witness an equally long series of often brutal polemics fought over crucial issues with thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, John R. Searle, and Jürgen Habermas, as well as several controversies that went far beyond academia, the best known of which concerned Heidegger and Paul de Man. We follow a series of courageous political commitments in support of Nelson Mandela, illegal immigrants, and gay marriage. And we watch as a concept – deconstruction – takes wing and exerts an extraordinary influence way beyond the philosophical world, on literary studies, architecture, law, theology, feminism, queer theory, and postcolonial studies. In writing this compelling and authoritative biography, Benoît Peeters talked to over a hundred individuals who knew and worked with Derrida. He is also the first person to make use of the huge personal archive built up by Derrida throughout his life and of his extensive correspondence. Peeters’ book gives us a new and deeper understanding of the man who will perhaps be seen as the major philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century. (shrink)

The conventional description of biography as a form of nonfiction narrative begs questions about the stories biographies tell, the facts that constitute their raw material, and the language in which they are cast. These questions are seen as central for students of the arts and humanities and are addressed as three interrelated issues as exemplified in literary biography. First, it is argued that biographies have a cellular structure that derives from the imposition of a master narrative over the subject’s (...) life, one that creates continuity and coherence from the heterogeneous accumulation of mininarratives found in the biographer’s sources. The factual status of these sources is shown to be complex due to the ambiguous nature of the subject’s literary works considered as data; to be unstable due to unavoidable features such as archival gaps, and the selectivity, speculation, and error that are inherent in the biographical process; and to be malleable because of the particular agenda that motivates every biography. Finally, the “literariness” of biographical language is shown to be fundamental in the rhetorical evocation of the subject. Art and artifice combine in a genre that provokes questions about the relationship between the life stories biographers construct and the narratives by which we make sense of life. (shrink)

This guest column comprises both a review of the English translation of Carlo Ginzburg's book Threads and Traces: True False Fictive and some general comments on the merits and demerits of microhistory as a genre poised between historical writing and fiction. The column is published in the context of two others regarding this latter topic — one by Natalie Zemon Davis, the author of the microhistorical classic The Return of Martin Guerre, and one by Colin Richmond. Davis's column is a (...) response to Keith Thomas's having drawn approving attention to the following remark of J. H. Elliott's: “Something is amiss when the name of Martin Guerre threatens to become better known than that of Martin Luther.” In the present piece, Thomas writes of Ginzburg, a founder of Italian microhistory, that he is more a “European intellectual” than a “mere historian,” the difference being that the former is less interested in history per se than in fields like anthropology, philosophy, and literary theory. Thomas's column expresses doubt about the intellectual restlessness of historians like Ginzburg and about the preparation of microhistorians to write constantly on topics new to them, but it claims as well that Ginzburg's “combination of erudition and piercing intelligence is irresistible.”. (shrink)