Few literary genres have had as erratic a fate as polemical literature: since the advent of the printing press and a 'reflexive' public sphere, polemical literature has been widely read, often reviled, sometimes censored, mostly appreciated by 'ordinary' readers, and generally neglected by academic reading publics. In fact, pamphlets and manifestos are not only central genres in political modernity, they are also highly efficacious social operators: they shift territorial boundaries, enforce normative changes, institute behavioral expectations, and assemble coalitions across entrenched social groups and classes. However, judging by the scarcity of academic literature on the subject, we know next to nothing about the powers attributed, rightly or wrongly, to literary polemic. At a time when literary disciplines are challenged daily to justify their very existence and subjected to unrelenting economic pressures, this disinterest is a missed chance to demonstrate the relevance of scholarship in the humanities. What can we learn from these polemical texts?Simplifying radically, polemical literature can be described as a more or less coherent aesthetic and political tradition, not least because it has made recurrent use of a few distinct formal devices. Among these, lists and enumerations figure prominently. From Martin Luther's 95 Theses (1517) to Filippo Marinetti's Fascist Manifesto (1919) and from the leaflets of the movements opposing apartheid in South Africa to the founding documents of feminist internet politics , lists have structured contentious claims and 1 2/6
This paper formulates two general claims. Firstly: that the indeterminacy of the notion of life (bios) is one of the central, albeit covert, problems historians face when applying biographical methods to historical inquiry. Secondly: that the definition and redefinition of bios itself should be acknowledged as one of the main collective projects of the biographical tradition, especially in the related fields that have nurtured the biographyhistory debate in the last decades. The paper discusses three self-reflexive biographies (metabiographies), probing them for their articulation of subject, history, narrative and reception. It argues that a more open questioning of the core concepts and possibilities of the genre could break the methodological deadlock of current biographical historiography.
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