Defining Metabiography in Historical Perspective: Between Biomyths and Documentary

Saunders, Edward

doi:10.1353/bio.2015.0032

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Edward Saunders cites Wolfgang Hildesheimer's Mozart (1977) as an early example of metabiography; this work deploys images such as the restored fresco (a work of myriad painted layers that have solidified over time) or a musical score where the biographer must tease out the harmonies and discords between melody (work) and bass (life). 4 Saunders notes that Hildesheimer seeks to effect a disentanglement of the layers of myth within the act of biography but Mozart in fact highlights the 'difficulty of negotiating a life story without myth-making, and the impossibility of writing a life without doing so to some degree'. 5 In her book-length study on this topic, Caitríona Ní Dhúill calls metabiography 'a way of reading biography' 6 in which the markers and assumptions of biographical practice are, themselves, subject to interpretation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…4 Saunders notes that Hildesheimer seeks to effect a disentanglement of the layers of myth within the act of biography but Mozart in fact highlights the 'difficulty of negotiating a life story without myth-making, and the impossibility of writing a life without doing so to some degree'. 5 In her book-length study on this topic, Caitríona Ní Dhúill calls metabiography 'a way of reading biography' 6 in which the markers and assumptions of biographical practice are, themselves, subject to interpretation. Metabiographical practices bring to the fore biography's case of 'medial envy', 7 where the recurrent metaphor of the portrait and related pictorialist analogies create a tension in the 'life as story' model, which is 'constantly undone by the spatiality and the visuality of the life to be represented'.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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New Women’s Biopics: Performance and the Queering of Herstor/ies

Vidal

2021

EJLW

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This article revisits the debates about the postfeminist biopic in the 21st century through the films Wild Nights with Emily (Olnek, 2018), Florence Foster Jenkins (Frears, 2016), The Favourite (Lanthimos, 2018) and particularly Colette (Westmoreland, 2018) to examine the ways in which new women’s biopics queer women’s histories. The article examines the debates about representation concerning the female biopic (Bingham 2010, Polaschek 2013), especially the problematic conflation of a woman’s body/sexuality with her body of work and proposes an analysis of screen biography as a filmic (that is, mediated) event open to non-normative identifications and desires. Biopics of women demand a shift in focus from representation to performance, both in relation to the actor’s function as the cornerstone of the biographical fiction and in relation to the performativity of the genre itself. Drawing on Landsberg (2015), I argue that new women’s biopics stage encounters between the spectator and the historical figure through different forms of mediation. In this respect, I examine the modalities of reflexive performance in connection with queer bodies and subjectivities in the first three films cited above, before moving on to a case study on Colette. Colette largely plays in the mid-Atlantic idiom of the postfeminist biopic (Polaschek 2013), including a non-imitative star turn by Keira Knightley, whose star persona is briefly analysed, yet the film’s queerness entertains a complex relationship with this postfeminist framework. While queer identities risk becoming diluted into the standard trajectory of female emancipation proposed by the film (a narrative invested with added urgency in the post-#MeToo moment), performance inflects this narrative differently: the intermedial mise-en-scène (particularly photographic posing, theatre, and dance) makes Colette a biopic equally concerned with the retrieval of women’s histories as with the production of the queer female self against the backdrop of patriarchal cultural industries.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

New Women’s Biopics: Performance and the Queering of Herstor/ies

Vidal

2021

EJLW

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Experiments in Life-Writing: Introduction

Novak

2017

Palgrave Studies in Life Writing

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Other people's life stories fascinate us, and we seem to have an urgent need to record these stories. As writers continue to experiment with the formal and aesthetic possibilities of rendering their subjects' lives in ever new ways, the modes of writing about historical lives have diversified enormously, and continue to do so. The proliferation of public interest in accounts of historical lives in recent decades-captured by such buzzwords as "biography boom" or "memoir craze"-is reflected in the similarly expanding field of life-writing studies, as scholars regularly re-conceptualise their object of study to keep pace with the rapid evolution of life-writing forms and to incorporate the new insights their discipline has yielded. Within this context, the term "life-writing" itself has emerged to reflect the diverse work conducted in the field. It has now come to stand for a range of writings about lives or parts of lives, or which provide materials out of which lives or parts of lives are composed. These writings include not only memoir, autobiography, biography, diaries, autobiographical fiction, and biographical fiction, but also letters, writs, wills, written anecdotes, depositions, court proceedings, . . . marginalia, nonce writings, lyric poems, scientific and historical writings, and digital forms. 1

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Annual Bibliography of Works about Life Writing, 2014–2015

Wachter¹

2016

Biography

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Defining Metabiography in Historical Perspective: Between Biomyths and Documentary

Cited by 5 publications

References 22 publications

New Women’s Biopics: Performance and the Queering of Herstor/ies

New Women’s Biopics: Performance and the Queering of Herstor/ies

Experiments in Life-Writing: Introduction

Annual Bibliography of Works about Life Writing, 2014–2015

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