BIOGRAPHY
Biography
Biography
One of the oldest genres of literature, biography is a written account of a person's life. It is also known as "life writing," a broader term that encompasses autobiography and other narrative forms such as letters, memoirs, journals, and diaries. The term biography derives from the Greek bios (life) and graphein (to write). Latin and Greek terms for biography were used in antiquity. Before the adoption of the word biography into English in the seventeenth century, common terms for biography were life and the Latin biographia.
Many of the earliest "histories" were biographical accounts of the lives of important historical figures. Biography often has been associated with the field of history (and at times has been considered a branch of it), but distinctions between them were drawn beginning in ancient times. Whereas the writers of histories always have purported to present the truth accurately, biographers more obviously have praised their subjects or have presented them as exemplars for moral or didactic (educational) purposes.
Although formal definitions of biography vary, biographical literature includes such forms as character sketches, single biography, serial biography, literary biography, ethical (or didactic) biography, critical biography, and hagiography (sacred biography). In addition, biography shares many features with other literary genres, including travel writing and epistolary literature (that is, literature based on letters), and certain novelistic forms, such as the biographical novel and the bildungsroman that follows the development of a young character. The mixture of fiction with fact in biography means that it has much in common with imaginative literature. For example, the emergence of the novel as a genre paralleled developments in biography. Many early novels adopted a biographical form. In contemporary literature, a novelized biography may be nearly indistinguishable from a biographical novel.
Some commentators have indicated that biography, as an independent form, has been predominantly a product of Western civilization. In particular, they have pointed to the comparatively greater focus on the individual personality in Western biographical literature. If one follows a narrowly construed definition of biography, and adopts Western forms as standards, then this conclusion may seem plausible. Yet while the development of biography in the West has followed a unique trajectory, the production of biographical literature (and likely the biographical impulse witnessed in oral cultures) appears to be universal. Nevertheless, some differences between Western and non-Western traditions must be considered. In China, for example, biographical literature has been largely contained within a historiographic tradition and has been primarily related to the literature of the art of government. In India, biographical writings (such as fragments regarding the Buddha) have been contained within a larger body of spiritual literature.
Just as it is difficult to find an unbiased historical narrative (and many histories have been written for political purposes), biography long has been written for political, moral, or didactic purposes. The origins of biography in epideictic rhetoric (panegyric, or elaborate praise) means that biographers (whether of kings or revolutionaries) have been more interested in praising their subjects' actions or characters than in presenting historically accurate accounts. For this reason, the genre has lent itself to politicized narratives (including political histories or political romances) and narratives that define personal identity. Although biography traditionally has centered on rulers, philosophers, or literati, modern biographers have taken a wide variety of persons for their subjects, including women and individuals from underrepresented or persecuted groups.
BIOGRAPHY
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: biography
Form of nonfictional literature whose subject is the life of an individual. The earliest biographical writings probably were funeral speeches and inscriptions. The origins of modern biography lie with Plutarch's moralizing lives of prominent Greeks and Romans and Suetonius's gossipy lives of the Caesars. Few biographies of common individuals were written until the 16th century. The major developments of English biography came in the 18th century, with such works as James Boswell's Life of Johnson. In modern times impatience with Victorian reticence and the development of psychoanalysis have sometimes led to a more penetrating and comprehensive understanding of biographical subjects. See also autobiography.
Classical Literature Companion: biography
biography 1. Greek. Greek biography proper was a late development, though rudimentary forms of it can be seen in the dirge and the funeral oration and in the character sketches of the historians, e.g. of Pausanias and Themistocles in Thucydides. In the fourth century BC appear the Cyropaedia, Memorabilia, and Agesilaus (see under separate titles) of Xenophon, as well as the Evagoras of Isocrates, which all approach true biography. It was Aristotle's pupils in the fourth and third centuries BC who developed an interest in biography and gave a more systematic form to its composition. The tradition persisted among the Alexandrian scholars who valued biographical information about classical authors as a means of explaining their writings, and among those historians who aimed to entertain their readers by giving prominence to outstanding personalities. (Polybius, the only Hellenistic historian we still possess, is not representative of this school.) None of this work survives except in fragments. Over two hundred years later Plutarch (second century AD) owed the form of his Lives largely to his Hellenistic predecessors, but he clearly distinguished between biography and history, and the scope of his work was original. His biographies were markedly moral in tone, since his aim was to exemplify the virtue displayed by the careers of great men; hence his concentration upon the characters of his heroes. In the early third century AD Diogenes Laertius wrote a compendium of the lives and doctrines of the Greek philosophers, but it is merely a synthesis of earlier compositions.
2. Roman. Roman biography developed from a native tradition of funeral orations and sepulchral inscriptions which listed the achievements of the dead man in considerable detail. Many generals and politicians wrote accounts of their careers in order to justify their actions; Sulla, for example, wrote his memoirs in twenty-two books. Under the empire memoirs were written by the emperor or members of his family, by Augustus and Tiberius, for example. All these works are lost. The most important surviving biographies are those of famous men by Cornelius Nepos (first century BC), of Agricola by his son-in-law Tacitus (end of the first century AD), of the Twelve Caesars by Suetonius (Tacitus' younger contemporary), and of the later emperors by the writers of the Historia Augusta.The only autobiography that reveals the writer's own inner life and thoughts is the Confessions of St Augustine (written c. AD 397–400), though the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (AD 121–80) may be compared with it.
Columbia Encyclopedia: biography,
reconstruction in print or on film, of the lives of real men and women. Together with autobiography—an individual's interpretation of his own life—it shares a venerable tradition, meeting the demands of different audiences through the ages.
The Origins of Biography
Among the most ancient biographies are the narrative carvings and hieroglyphic inscriptions on Egyptian tombs and temples (c.1300 B.C.), and the cuneiform inscriptions on Assyrian palace walls (c.720 B.C.) or Persian rock faces (c.520 B.C.). All these records proclaimed the deeds of kings, although accuracy often gave way to glorification. Among the first biographies of ordinary men, the Dialogues of Plato (4th cent. B.C.) and the Gospels of the New Testament (1st and 2d cent. A.D.) reveal their respective subjects by letting each speak for himself. Even these early achievements of biography, however, lack critical balance.
Equilibrium was established by Plutarch in The Parallel Lives (2d cent. A.D.). His method was comparative, e.g., Theseus is matched with Romulus; Demosthenes with Cicero. In his conclusions, he evaluates the connection between the moral standards and worldly achievements of each. St. Augustine turned the same critical judgment on himself in his Confessions (4th cent.), comparing his character and conduct before and after his conversion to Christianity.
During the Middle Ages credibility continued to be sacrificed to credulity. In the hagiographies, or lives of the saints, human flaws and actual events were bypassed in favor of saintly traits and miracles. Yet the few secular biographies produced in that era, Einhard's Life of Charlemagne (9th cent.), Eadmer's Life of St. Anselm (12th cent.), Jean de Joinville's Memoirs of St. Louis IX (13th cent.), and Jean Froissart's Chroniques (15th cent.), redeem the genre with their lively depiction of personalities and events.
With the Renaissance came rekindled interest in worldly power and self-assertion. Benvenuto Cellini's Autobiography (16th cent.), recounting his escapades and artistic achievements, is a monument to the ego. Saint-Simon's Memoirs (late 17th cent.) describe Louis XIV and his court at Versailles and record the effect of the monarch's absolute power on the daily lives of others. In England, Samuel Pepys's Diary, John Evelyn's Diary, Izaak Walton's Lives and John Aubrey's Lives of Eminent Men (all mid-17th cent.) introduced informality and intimacy to their treatments. Each wrote about contemporaries who were their friends or acquaintances.
The Development of Biography as a Literary Form
By the 18th cent. literary biography (works about poets and men of letters) had become an important extension of the genre. Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets (1779–81) set the example for James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), the first definitive biography. This monumental work was drawn not only from Boswell's exact recollections of conversations with Johnson, but from letters, memoirs, and interviews with others in Johnson's circle as well. Two equally celebrated autobiographies, Benjamin Franklin's, noted for its practicality, and Jean Jacques Rousseau's, noted for its candor, also mark this age.
Among the avalanche of biographies and autobiographies published in the 19th cent. Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit (1808–31), Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1833–34) and Frederick the Great (1858–65), and Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus (1863) are important. Also noteworthy was the publication of the Dictionary of National Biography (1882), edited by Leslie Stephen.
As a result of Freud's defining of the unconscious, the 20th cent. produced a new sort of biography—one that used the technique of psychoanalysis on the subject. Examples of such works are Freud's own Leonardo Da Vinci (1910) and Anaïs Nin's Diaries (1931–44). As antidotes to the tradition of the official biography Lytton Strachey wrote Eminent Victorians (1918) and Queen Victoria (1921), works that deflate and debunk.
Twentieth-century biographers often sought to make structure a reflection of theme. Henry Adams's Education of Henry Adams (1918) explores the metaphor of the title; Thomas Merton's Seven Story Mountain (1948) follows the analogue of Dante's Inferno; and Lillian Hellman's Pentimento (1973) presents portrait sketches of the people in her life as seen from the vantage point of her maturity. Notable literary and scholarly biographers of the 20th cent. include Harold Nicolson, Allan Nevins, D. S. Freeman, André Maurois, J. H. Plumb, Carl Sandburg, Dumas Malone, Elizabeth Longford, and Leon Edel.
Biography in a Multimedia Age
Motion pictures and television have adapted the form of biography to their own needs. With Paul Muni as Louis Pasteur, Charles Laughton as Rembrandt, or Spencer Tracy as Thomas Edison, films retraced for new audiences, although often in a romanticized fashion, the paths to success taken by men of intelligence and character: the old Plutarchian formula. Documentary biographies, composed of newsreel clips and photographs, have been made about public figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt, the Duke of Windsor, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Two innovations of television are the dramatic documentary (“docudrama”) and the interview. Ken Russell's film essays, commissioned by the British Broadcasting Company (1965–70), on Elgar, Rossetti, Delius, Richard Strauss, and Isadora Duncan attempted to convey the essence of a person's character and work rather than just the facts of his life. Homage to Plutarch was evident again in the format of Edward R. Murrow's interview program, Person to Person (1953–59), where guests like Marilyn Monroe and Sir Thomas Beecham were deliberately paired.
The television interview was expanded by such talk show hosts as Dick Cavett, David Frost, and Charlie Rose, who have led their usually well-known guests to talk about their lives for an hour or longer. The expansion of oral history programs, in which prominent figures record their reminiscences, are also providing a body of primary biographical source material. With the advent of cable television, biography became a daily staple of various channels and biographies were offered as part of the programming on channels devoted to a number of special subjects, e.g., history and education.
Bibliography
See H. G. Nicolson, The Development of English Biography (1928); E. H. O'Neill, A History of American Biography (1961); A. Maurois, Aspects of Biography (tr. 1966); S. Weinberg, Telling the Untold Story (1992).
Grammar Dictionary: biography
The story of someone's life. The Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell, and Abraham Lincoln, by Carl Sandburg, are two noted biographies. The story of the writer's own life is an autobiography.
Quotes About: Biography
Quotes: "Biography is one of the new terrors of death." - John Arbuthnot"When my journal appears, many statues must come down." - Duke of Wellington Arthur Wellesley"Biography should be written by an acute enemy." - Arthur James Balfour"Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable, so with autobiography." - Hilaire Belloc"In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink." - Catherine Drinker Bowen"Show me a character whose life arouses my curiosity, and my flesh begins crawling with suspense." - Fawn M. Brodie
Wikipedia: biography
Biography (from the Greek words bios meaning "life", and graphein meaning "write") is a genre of literature and other forms of media such as film, based on the written accounts of individual lives. While a biography may focus on a subject of fiction or non-fiction, the term is usually in reference to non-fiction. As opposed to a profile or curriculum vitae, a biography develops a complex analysis of personality, highlighting different aspects of it and including intimate details of experiences. A biography is more than a list of impersonal facts like birth, education, work, relationships and death. It also delves into the emotions of experiencing such events.
Early forms
The first known biographies were written by scribes commissioned by the various rulers of antiquity: ancient Assyria, ancient Babylonia, ancient Egypt, ancient Mesopotamia, among others. Such biographies tended to be chiseled into stone or clay tablets, a method called cuneiform.
The Jewish holy scripture is an anthology of some of the earliest biographies in existence, detailing the lives of chiefs, kings, tribes, patriarchs and prophets. However, the dates of these written accounts are disputed.
Classical forms
Ancient Greeks developed the biographical tradition which we have inherited, although until the 5th century AD, when the word 'biographia' first appears, in Damascius' Life of Isodorus, biographical pieces were called simply "lives" (βιοι: "bioi"). It is quite likely that the Greeks were drawing on a pre-existing eastern tradition; certainly Herodotus' Histories contains more detailed biographical information on Persian kings and subjects than on anyone else, implying he had a Persian source for it.
The earliest surviving pieces which we would identify as biographical are Isocrates' Life of Evagoras and Xenophon's Life of Agesilaos, both from the fifth century BC. Both identified themselves as encomia, or works of praise, and that biography was regarded as a discrete entity from historiography is evidenced by the fact that Xenophon treated King Agesilaos of Sparta twice in his works, once in the above-mentioned encomium and once in his Greek History; evidently the two genres were conceived as making different demands of authors who enrolled in them. Xenophon could present his Cyropaedia, an account of the childhood of the Persian King Cyrus the Great now regarded as so fabulous that it falls rather into a novelistic tradition than a biographical one, as a serious work, without any disclaimers or caveats.
Whereas Thucydides set the benchmark for a historiographical tradition comprising 'conclusions ... drawn from proofs quoted ... [which] may safely be relied upon' (Thuc. 1.21), and offering little explicit judgement on the men with whom he dealt, biographers were quite often more concerned with drawing a moral point from their investigations of their subjects. Parallel Lives by Plutarch, a Greek writing under the Roman empire, is a series of short biographies of eminent men, ancient and contemporary, arranged in pairs comprising one Greek, one Roman, in order that a broad educative point might be extraced from the comparison (for example Mark Antony and Demetrius were paradigms of tyranny, Lysander and Sulla examples of great men degenerating into blood-thirsty corruption).
However, although their moralising approach is not in fashion in the current intellectual climate, Greek biographies still have much to offer the modern reader, and for the most part it is reasonable to assume that while authors may have suppressed details which did not fall in with the general theme which they wished to convey, they are unlikely to have fabricated much. Not least, they were instrumental in developing the modern idea of the person. The traditional Greek attitude to individuals was to 'reduce them to types'; the Peripatetic tradition records various categories into which men might fall: the flatterer, the superstitious man and so on. Greek rhetorical handbooks give advice on 'ethopoia', that is creating a character, one of a recognised type, to win favour in the law courts.
The biographical tradition does draw on these types, but it also gives explicit recognition to the importance of individual ideosyncrasies in defining a man, and places the emphasis firmly on a man's personality rather than merely listing his accomplishments. As Plutarch says in the introduction to his Life of Alexander the Great, 'in the most illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of virtue and vice, but a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation than battles where thousands fall, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities'. Thus the individual is recognised as having some value and interest irrespective of the impact of his actions on the broader sweep of history.
Under the Roman Empire, the biographical and historiographical traditions converged somewhat, likely due to the nature of government, whereby the state was dominated by a single emperor with totalitarian power and whose character and actions set the tone for the period; Tacitus's History and his Annals, as well as Dio's History contain much of the same material as the biographer Suetonius's Lives of the Twelve Caesars. However, although Tacitus in particular was extremely critical of the regime, his disapproval emerges in subtle characterisation and arrangement of his material, in contrast with Suetonius' vicious authorial comment.
Middle Ages and Renaissance
The Early Middle Ages (AD 400 to 1450) saw a decline in awareness of classical culture. During this time, the only repositories of knowledge and records of early history was the Roman Catholic Church. Hermits, monks and priests used this historic period to write the first modern biographies. Their subjects were usually restricted to church fathers, martyrs, popes and saints. Their works were meant to be inspirational to people, vehicles for conversion to Christianity. See hagiography. One significant example of biography from this period which does not exactly fit into that mold is the life of Charlemagne as written by his courtier Einhard.
By the late Middle Ages, biographies became less church-oriented as biographies of kings, knights and tyrants began to appear. The most famous of these such biographies was Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory. The book was an account of the life of the fabled King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.
Following Malory, the new emphasis on humanism during the Renaissance promoted a focus on secular subjects such as artists and poets, and encouraged writing in the vernacular. Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (1550) was a landmark biography focusing on secular lives. Vasari created celebrities of his subjects, as the Lives became an early "best seller." Two other developments are noteworthy: the development of the printing press in the fifteenth century and the gradual increase in literacy.
Biographies in the English language began appearing during the reign of Henry VIII. John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), better known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, essentially was the first dictionary of biography, followed by Thomas Fuller’s The History of the Worthies of England (1662), with a distinct focus on public life.
Modern biography
The "Golden Age" of English biography emerged in the late 1700s, the century in which the terms "biography" and "autobiography" entered the English lexicon. The classic works of the period were Samuel Johnson's Critical Lives of the Poets (1779-81) and James Boswell's massive Life of Johnson (1791). The Boswellian approach to biography emphasized uncovering material and letting the subject "speak for itself." While Boswell compiled, Samuel Johnson composed. Johnson did not follow a chronological narration of the subject's life but used anecdotes and incidents selectively. Johnson rejected the notion that facts revealed truth. He suggested that biographers should seek their subject in "domestic privacies", to find little known facts or anecdotes which revealed character. (Casper, 1999)
The romantic biographers disputed many of Johnson's judgments. Jean Jacques Rousseau's Confessions (1781-88) exploited the romantic point of view and the confessional mode. The tradition of testimony and confession was brought to the New World by Puritan and Quaker memoirists and journal-keepers where the form continued to be influential. Benjamin Franklin's autobiography (1791) would provide the archetype for the American success story. (Stone, 1982) Autobiography would remain an influential form of biographical writing.
Generally, American biography followed the English model, however, incorporating Thomas Carlyle's view that biography was a part of history. Carlyle asserted that the lives of great men were important to understanding society and its institutions. While the historical impulse would remain a strong element in early American biography, American writers carved out their own distinct approach. What emerged was a rather didactic form of biography which sought to shape individual character of the reader in the process of defining national character. (Casper, 1999)
The distinction between mass biography and literary biography which had formed by mid nineteenth century reflected a breach between high culture and middle-class culture. This division would endure for the remainder of the century. Biography began to flower thanks to new publishing technologies and an expanding reading public. This revolution in publishing made books available to a larger audience of readers. Almost ten times as many American biographies appeared from 1840 to 1860 than had appeared in the first two decades of the century. In addition, affordable paperback editions of popular biographies were published for the first time. Also, American periodicals began publishing series of biographical sketches. (Casper, 1999) The topical emphasis shifted from republican heroes to self-made men.
Much of late 19th-century biography remained formulaic. Notably, few autobiographies had been written in the 19th century. The following century witnessed a renaissance of autobiography beginning with Booker T. Washington's, Up From Slavery (1901) and followed by Henry Adams' Education (1907), a chronicle of self-defined failure which ran counter to the predominant American success story. The publication of socially significant autobiographies by both men and women began to flourish. (Stone, 1982)
The authority of psychology and sociology was ascendant and would make its mark on the new century’s biographies. (Stone, 1982) The demise of the "great man" theory of history was indicative of the emerging mindset. Human behavior would be explained through Darwinian theories. "Sociological" biographies based their subjects' actions as the result of the environment, and tended to downplay individuality. The development of psychoanalysis led to a more penetrating and comprehensive understanding of the biographical subject, and induced biographers to give more emphasis to childhood and adolescence. Clearly, psychological ideas were changing the way Americans read and wrote biographies, as a culture of autobiography developed in which the telling of one's own story became a form of therapy. (Casper, 1999)
The conventional concept of national heroes and narratives of success disappeared in the obsession with psychological explorations of personality. The new school of biography featured iconoclasts, scientific analysts, and fictional biographers. This wave included Lytton Strachey, André Maurois, and Emil Ludwig among others. Strachey's biographies had an influence similar to that which Samuel Johnson had enjoyed earlier. In the 1920s and '30s, biographical writers sought to capitalize on Strachey's popularity and imitate his style. Robert Graves (I, Claudius, 1934) stood out among those following Strachey's model of "debunking biographies." The trend in literary biography was accompanied in popular biography by a sort of "celebrity voyeurism." in the early decades of the century. This latter form's appeal to readers was based on curiosity more than morality or patriotism.
By World War I, cheap hard-cover reprints had become popular. The decades of the 1920s witnessed a biographical "boom." In 1929, nearly 700 biographies were published in the United States, and the first dictionary of American biography appeared. In the decade that followed, numerous biographies continued to be published despite the economic depression. They reached a growing audience through inexpensive formats and via public libraries.
Women's biographies were revolutionized in the 1970s, according to scholar Carolyn Heilbrun. At this time women began to be portrayed more accurately, even if it downplayed the achievements or integrity of a man (Heilbrun 12). This was in the era of the feminist movement.
Multi-media forms
With therms technological advancements created in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, multi-media forms of biography became much more popular than literary forms. Visual and film images were able to elaborate new dimensions of personality that written forms could not. The popularity of these forms of biography culminated in the creation of such cable and satellite television networks as A&E, The Biography Channel, The History Channel and History International. Along with documentary film biographies, Hollywood produced numerous commercial films based on the lives of famous people.
More recently, CD-ROM and online biographies are appearing. Unlike books and films, they oftentimes do not tell a chronological story; instead, they are archives of many discrete media elements related to an individual person, including video clips, photographs, and text articles. Media scholar Lev Manovich says that such archives exemplify the database form, allowing users to navigate the materials in many ways (Manovich 220).
References
· Casper, Scott E. Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
· Heilbrun, Carolyn. Writing a Woman's Life. New York: Ballantine Books, 1989.
· Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.
· Stone, Albert E. Autobiographical Occasions and Original Acts. Philadelphia: University of Pennnsylvania Pres, 1982.
Book Awards
Annually, several countries offer their writers a specific prize for writing a biography such as the:
· Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize – Canada
· National Biography Award – Australia
· Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography – United States
· Whitbread Prize for Best Biography – United Kingdom
· J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography – United Kingdom
Auto/Biography And Life-Writing: Self And Other
It is conventional to distinguish between autobiography (a life of the self) and biography (a life of another). Conventional, too, is the expectation that autobiography will be written in the first person singular by an “I” who is both subject and object of the narrative, while biography will be written about a third person “she” or “he” who is quite distinct from a more or less invisible narrator. Often such conventional distinctions hold: the autobiography and biography sections of large bookstores are full of examples. However, there are also plenty of instances where writers choose to write about themselves as or through third persons (James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas are famous modern examples). It is therefore important to recognise that there is a continuous and complex relationship between writing about oneself and writing about another. The processes are closely analogous, even if not identical. Both autobiographers and biographers select and combine elements as they see fit. The result in both cases is “a life” (i.e., one of many possible lives) not “the life” (i.e., the one and only definitive life). Nor is autobiography necessarily any more “subjective” and biography any more “objective”: both can be equally (un)reliable and (im)partial. There is thus no necessary link - though one is often assumed - between literary fiction and autobiography on the one hand and historical fact and biography on the other hand. It all depends upon what kind of “truth” the reader is prepared to accept.
More generally, it also depends upon the notion of self and other in play. In PSYCHOLOGICAL terms, for instance, the self is split into a variety of roles: *conscious and *unconscious, *expressive and *repressive. In later Freudian terms there is ceaseless negotiation between the “I”, the “above-I” and the “that (other)” (ego, superego and id)... Meanwhile, in socio-political terms the person can be seen not as a fixed entity but as a changing and changeable identity ... Who “I am”, “we are” “and “s/he is” then depends as much upon social-historical conditions as upon psychological predispositions. Most pointedly, in a “them and us” situation, this comes down to who counts as one of us (identified with self) and who counts as one of them (identified as other).
For all the above reasons, many contemporary theorists and practitioners prefer to talk more capaciously of life-writing or use the slashed form “auto/biography”. Both leave open the matter of precisely who is writing whose life. (For much the same reasons, some postmodernist writers and discourse analysts prefer to talk of all writing as faction rather than some as “fiction” and some as “fact”... or of hi/story) as to suggest the radical continuity between forms of “story” and “history”
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