Lecture 3: Biographical Criticism

 Objectives 

At the end of this lecture, students should be able to

- define biographical criticism

· -discuss the postulations of biographical criticism

a. Introduction

      An author’s life, to a large extent, could affect the meaning of a work. Biographical criticism is a theoretical approach to literature that manifests some interest in the author. It is a critical approach to literature in which information about an author’s life and background is used to better understand his works. A writer's life may shed light on his or her literature and the literature of the era. It is necessary to know about the author and the political, economical, and sociological context of his times in order to truly understand his literature. It focuses on links between a work’s content and the writer’s life; often use the writer’s intentions, experiences, motives, or beliefs to interpret his/her literary texts. In this lecture, you are going to learn how the facts about an author's life could signpost ideas in his work. You will also learn how an event in the author‘s life could affect his or her themes or choice of subject matter[p1] .

     Biographical criticism begins with the simple but central insight that literature is written by actual people and that understanding an author’s life can help readers comprehend the work more thoroughly[p2] . Anyone who reads the biography of a writer quickly sees how much an author’s experience shapes—both directly and indirectly—what he or she creates. Thus, reading that biography could change (and usually deepen) our response to the work. Sometimes, mere knowing a single important fact about an author‘s life could illuminate[p3]  our reading of a poem or story. Though many literary theorists have assailed biographical criticism on philosophical grounds, the biographical approach to literature has never disappeared because of its obvious practical advantage in illuminating literary texts.

5.1. Biographical Criticism: A Definition 

       It is very advantageous to define biography before moving to its critical approach. A biography is a text written by an author about another person. That person may be dead or alive. An approach deems it necessary to know about the author and the political, economical, and sociological context of his times in order to truly understand the work(s). Biographies provide all sorts of information about a person, including where they are from, their families, and major life events and achievements.

      Biographical criticism is the practice of analyzing a piece of literary work through the lens of the author‘s experience. It considers the ways age, race, gender, family, education, and economic status inform a writer‘s work. In biographical criticism, a critic might also examine how a literary work reflects the personality characteristics, life experiences, and psychological dynamics of the author[p4] . The need for biography theory today as a field of innovative methods of research common to several disciplines in the humanities has been amply[p5]  demonstrated by the masterful synthetic works — on a widely diachronic, international, and interdisciplinary basis — of some researchers in German-speaking countries, like Bernhard Fetz, Hannes Schweiger, and Wilhelm Hemecker of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Biographie in Vienna, or Christian Klein at the Bergischen Universität Wuppertal. (Moulin)

      The thrust of biographical criticism is that to understand some literary works, readers need knowledge of the author‘s biographical facts or experiences. Kelly Griffith (2002) has opined that biographical criticism received intellectual impetus from the 19th and 20th centuries’ ideas about science and is still very much practiced. Samuel Johnson is reputed to be the first great biographical critic. His book Lives of the Poets (1779) provided truthful accounts of authors' lives and astute[p6]  assessments of their literary achievements. Biographical criticism provides practical assistance in understanding subtle but important meanings in a work. It focuses on explicating a literary text by using the insight provided by knowledge of the author‘s life. Among the questions to ask in biographical criticism include: "How does the text reflect the author's life? Is this text an extension of the author's position on issues in the author's life?"

5.2. The Fundamental Tenets of Biographical Criticism

As noted in the introductory section above, biographical criticism studies how an individual author’s life and thoughts influence a work. This means that biographical criticism is not an attempt to draw parallels between the author’s life and his fiction; rather, it is a study of the author’s intention and audience. Biographical criticism seeks to illuminate the deeper meaning of themes, conflicts, characters, settings, and literary allusions based on the author’s concerns and conflicts. For biographical critics, a literary work is a reflection of the author’s life and should be studied in conjunction for full meaning and appreciation. Biographical criticism examines the effect and influence of the writer’s life on his or her work. The premise behind biographical criticism is that knowing something about the writer’s life helps us to more fully understand his or her work. Understanding the writer’s life and influences helps the reader discover the author’s intended meaning[p7] . Biographical criticism assumes that the interpretation of a literary work should be based on an understanding of the context in which the work was written.

     Although biographical criticism is not concerned with retelling the author’s life; rather, it applies information from the author’s life to the interpretation of the work. The focus remains on the work of literature, and the biographical information is pulled in only as a means of enhancing our understanding of the work. For biographical critics, the writing of literary works is affected by the lives and experiences of their authors. This, however, is not to assume that all works are biographical; rather, all works are certainly influenced by the life experience of the writer. For a thorough biographical criticism, the reader should research the author’s life; use the biographical information to understand the inferential and evaluative levels of the work; research the author‘s beliefs; relate those systems of belief to the work; explain how the connections reflect in the work’s themes and topics; explain what can be determined about the author’s statements within the text based on the biographical information. This approach works well for some works -like those of Alexander Pope, John Dryden, and Milton – which are obviously political in nature.

    Thus, when doing a biographical criticism, the following questions should be asked: Are facts about the writer’s life relevant to my understanding of the work? Are characters and incidents in the work versions of the writer’s own experiences? Are the writer’s values reflected in the work? How do the connections explain the author’s purpose and the overall meaning of the work? 

5.3. Drawbacks of Biographical Criticism 

      As we have learned so far, biographical criticism examines to what extent an author‘s life unintentionally affects his work. One drawback to this approach in literary criticism is the reliance on source material that may not be accurate or complete. Again, the New Critics’ school of literary critics believes that the biographical approach tends to reduce art to the level of biography, making it relative (to the times) rather than universal. Thus, a biographical critic should base his interpretation on what is in the text itself. In essence, biographical data should simply amplify the meaning of a text and not drown it out with irrelevant material. 

a. Conclusion          

Biographical criticism is a form of literary criticism which analyses a writer’s biography to show the relationship between the author’s life and his work. This critical method dates back to the Renaissance period and was employed extensively by Samuel Johnson in his Lives of the Poets (1779-81). Like any critical methodology, biographical criticism should be used with discretion and insight or employed as a superficial shortcut to understanding the literary work on its terms. Biographical criticism came under disapproval by the New Critics of the 1920s, who coined the term “biographical fallacy‖ to describe criticism that neglected the imaginative genesis of literature. Notwithstanding this critique by the New Critics, biographical criticism remained a significant mode of literary inquiry and continues to be employed in the study of literature. Biography imposes itself de facto as a practice that seems central to some post- “theory” advancements in the humanities.

a. Summary

      In summary, biographical criticism postulates that all literary works are situated in specific historical and biographical contexts from which they are generated. It rejects the concept that literary studies should be limited to the internal or formal characteristics of a literary work and insists that it properly includes knowledge of the life of the author who created the work. The biographical approach allows one to better understand elements within a work, as well as to relate works to the authorial intention and audience. 

References

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