Steve Weinberg: Biography, the Bastard Child of Academe
[Steve Weinberg's books include Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller (W.W. Norton, 2008). He teaches journalism at the University of Missouri at Columbia.]
Meryle Secrest recently wrote a book called Shoot the Widow: Adventures of a Biographer in Search of Her Subject (Knopf, 2007). The title is darkly humorous. Secrest does not literally plan homicide. But, like many biographers, she resents the widows (and widowers) who block access to documents that would reveal the foibles and accomplishments of the subjects under scrutiny.
Secrest — author of nine biographies, including studies of Frank Lloyd Wright and Leonard Bernstein — was trained as a journalist, most notably at The Washington Post. If she had been trained in academe, if she had begun her career by writing a doctoral dissertation about an individual's life, she almost surely would have approached her biographies, and her book title, more gingerly.
Secrest not only battles widows and widowers for access to information but also must choose whether to disclose previously secret heterosexual and homosexual love affairs, fend off threats of litigation, decide whether to follow or violate life-story chronology, and discern what factors have served as primary motivations for her famous, complex subjects.
Sadly, her risqué — and educational — revelations are quite unlikely to permeate university classrooms. Biography is rarely studied as a literary genre, despite its practice going back thousands of years, despite its prevalence on library shelves, despite its obvious fascination for readers.
We can theorize why biography has failed to gain traction in academe. But whatever the reasons, it is time to anoint biography — both its history and its composition — as a genre just as worthy of university courses as are novels, short stories, poetry, and essays.
An informal survey suggests that stand-alone courses about biography exist on, at most, a handful of American campuses. It appears that only one, the University of Hawaii, has made the craft of biography a major part of the curriculum.
Robert D. Habich, an English professor who teaches a graduate course in American literary biography at Ball State University, notes that "the entire drift of academic criticism and theory since the 1920s has tended to dismiss biography as a viable interpretive tool. From the 'New Critical' focus on independent texts in the 1930s to the fears of the 'intentional fallacy' in the 1940s to Roland Barthes's often-quoted death of the author in the 1970s, the theoretical emphasis has been to question where the authority for textual interpretation lies and to remove authorial intentions from the equation."...
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Ed
Meryle Secrest recently wrote a book called Shoot the Widow: Adventures of a Biographer in Search of Her Subject (Knopf, 2007). The title is darkly humorous. Secrest does not literally plan homicide. But, like many biographers, she resents the widows (and widowers) who block access to documents that would reveal the foibles and accomplishments of the subjects under scrutiny.
Secrest — author of nine biographies, including studies of Frank Lloyd Wright and Leonard Bernstein — was trained as a journalist, most notably at The Washington Post. If she had been trained in academe, if she had begun her career by writing a doctoral dissertation about an individual's life, she almost surely would have approached her biographies, and her book title, more gingerly.
Secrest not only battles widows and widowers for access to information but also must choose whether to disclose previously secret heterosexual and homosexual love affairs, fend off threats of litigation, decide whether to follow or violate life-story chronology, and discern what factors have served as primary motivations for her famous, complex subjects.
Sadly, her risqué — and educational — revelations are quite unlikely to permeate university classrooms. Biography is rarely studied as a literary genre, despite its practice going back thousands of years, despite its prevalence on library shelves, despite its obvious fascination for readers.
We can theorize why biography has failed to gain traction in academe. But whatever the reasons, it is time to anoint biography — both its history and its composition — as a genre just as worthy of university courses as are novels, short stories, poetry, and essays.
An informal survey suggests that stand-alone courses about biography exist on, at most, a handful of American campuses. It appears that only one, the University of Hawaii, has made the craft of biography a major part of the curriculum.
Robert D. Habich, an English professor who teaches a graduate course in American literary biography at Ball State University, notes that "the entire drift of academic criticism and theory since the 1920s has tended to dismiss biography as a viable interpretive tool. From the 'New Critical' focus on independent texts in the 1930s to the fears of the 'intentional fallacy' in the 1940s to Roland Barthes's often-quoted death of the author in the 1970s, the theoretical emphasis has been to question where the authority for textual interpretation lies and to remove authorial intentions from the equation."...