Theory biography

They are either historians or literary scholars, as are many of the academic writers who have defined biography as their object of research in recent years. On the one hand, biography is in part a literary genre, long disparaged as minor — but after Deleuze this should rather be considered as a promising asset. While resisting the temptation to take sides in this current debate for the time being, it should be noted that the very liveliness of the debate itself, which has been lasting for at least a quarter of a century, testifies to the existence of a theory need, a demand for theory, singling out biography in the larger sense — not just the literary genre — as an interdisciplinary field of research within the humanities, whose theorisation appears to be forthcoming, although it remains for the moment in a protracted incipient stage.

In this respect, mentalities have evolved to a point where biography research writers no longer feel obliged to justify themselves, and to vindicate the seriousness of their object in a supposedly hostile academic context. Dosse, to all intents and purposes, seems to have set out in this essay to do for biography something like what Philippe Lejeune had done for autobiography in Le pacte autobiographique Exit biography.

Like all other incipient disciplines, it is still in the process of defining itself, in a continual dialogue with its neighbouring theories biography — history, literary science, psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, etc. In this inchoative process, biography theory is striving to elaborate a sui generis modelisation, turning for inspiration to various other already theorised fields of the humanities.

But that is a misunderstanding, and as such it has lasted theory biography enough, although it is dying rather hard. For, in fact, these texts constitute seminal points of departure for biography theory: not only do they contain nothing likely to deter anyone from such an enterprise, but on the contrary they offer very useful clues as to some of the most promising directions that lay open for it.

There is no reason why biography theory should imply a rupture with the poststructuralist period of the humanities; quite the contrary, it results from it as a next logical step. Just as this paper offered space for a very few analeptic examples, it may yet envisage a quick proleptic glance at several schools of thinking that are most likely to afford food for thought towards a theory of biography.

Norbert Elias used to remark that the notion of individuum did not crystallise on the designation of the human person before the 17th century, whereas previously it was used in formal logic to signify a particular case, whatever its nature. Subjects of the first level, of which the simple engine of the vortex is the prototype, emerge from matter as spontaneous events.

Several remarks therefore impose themselves. Their current collective effort to produce a theory of biography is a crucial phase in the disciplinary development of the field. The articles in this journal issue are not meant to cohere as a whole into a proposal towards a theory of biography: that is only the chosen topic of this tentative prolegomenon.

Le bruissement de la langue : Essais critiques IV. La Relation biographique. Seyssel : Champ Vallon, Die Biographie : Zur Grundlegung ihrer Theorie. Brown 10 The Limits of Representativeness.

Theory biography: This textbook is an anthology

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Theory biography: The phrase 'theory of

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