A Culture of Biography

Kaplan, Justin

doi:10.1007/978-1-349-24960-2_1

Cited by 6 publications

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“…The advent of the Annales School and of the collective subjects explicit in histoire des mentalités and implicit in Social History further debased the status of biography as a valid mode of scientific enquiry. 3 The epistemological ambiguity suggested in such quips seems, however, to have finally been overcome -ironically in those terms that were considered the most contentious a few decades ago. Today, a somewhat fictionalised biography is routinely described as an imaginative scholarly contribution, and some degree of self-reflexivity or narrative free-play is condoned in biographical historiography.…”

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confidence: 96%

Personal epistemologies: historiography, self-reflexivity andbios

Monot

2012

European Review of History: Revue europeenne d'histoire

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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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confidence: 96%