Recognizing the Life-Text: Towards a Poetics of Biography

Abstract

By exploring contemporary generic relationships between the 'natural,' the 'cultural,' and the 'narratable' as an already inscribed narrative scheme (a generic frame ), we can project an approach to the poetics of biography. This generic frame employs these relationships as an elusive attempt to "recognize the life-text" as the moment of cultural transformation when a natural life become a narratable text, when a narrated event becomes a biographical fact.