Personal epistemologies: historiography, self-reflexivity andbios

Abstract

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.