This research strand is primarily concerned with the history of modern biographical writing. The beginnings of biography as a modern genre, with roots in the written lives of antiquity and the Renaissance, are traced from the turn of the 18th century in England. Drawing on specific hermeneutic and narratological interpretive strategies, the research programme centres on significant modern biographies and their contribution to the development of the genre. These texts are analysed with reference to their historical status, ideological context and method.

The inherent tensions in the modern conception of biography  –  between exemplarity and uniqueness, between the individual and the representative  –  are examined with reference to key works of English biographical writing, beginning with Dryden’s and North’s translations of Plutarch’s Lives. A figure of particular importance in this context is that of Samuel Johnson, whose double role as biographer and biographical subject provides fertile ground for reflection on the narratological questions raised by biography. A further line of investigation concerns the implications of Thomas Carlyle’s view of history as ‘the biography of great men’ for the historicist understanding of English and German biography in the 19th century.

The Institute’s research into the history of German biography begins with Herder’s theoretical reflections on the genre, followed by Goethe’s study of Winkelmann, in which biography is posited as a form of cultural history. Two subsequent developments in 19th century biography will be studied in greater depth: on the one hand, the political biography of the Prussian Historicist school, as exemplified by the numerous biographical works of Heinrich von Treitschke; on the other hand, the practice of biography as intellectual history by Rudolf Haym, Herman Grimm, Wilhelm Dilthey and Carl Justi.

Developments in biography in the early 20th century reveal a reaction against the positivism of the 19th Century. In Germany, this reaction took the form of mythographic biography as practised by adherents of the Stefan George circle; research into this area will focus primarily on a critical analysis of representative biographies by Ernst Bertram and Friedrich Gundolf. Research into early twentieth-century biography will also concentrate on the emergence of psychoanalytic biography in writings by Freud and his followers. As a counterpoint to these developments, contemporary biographical writing in English will also be considered, such as Lytton Strachey’s use of biography as satire to debunk the Victorian age.

After the First World War, biography flourished as a popular genre, characterised by increasing narrative and psychological sophistication. The production and reception of successful works of popular biography, a genre in which Emil Ludwig, Stefan Zweig and later Richard Friedenthal excelled, are examined in the context of sociological developments within the reading public. A further line of inquiry in this period concerns the shift in focus from the individual to the broader context of society and epoch; the portrayal of the biographical subject becomes indissociable from the consideration of social conditions. This shift is examined with reference to the biographical works of Hermann Broch, Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer.

Close analysis of narrative techniques in literary biography, focussing on works by Peter Härtling and Wolfgang Hildesheimer, will clarify key questions concerning the presentation of fact in literary texts and the transformation of biographical research into art. The theoretical framework for these analyses is informed by a critical response to the perspectives offered by New Historicist theories of literature and textuality. The resulting readings of specific literary biographies will reflect New Historicist concerns with the dialectical relationships between literary texts and cultural practices (institutions, codes and discourses) and with the traces of power relations, their containment and subversion within the literary ­– and biographical – text. In addition, highly topical and politically acute questions will be addressed in a lecture series on 'Biography and Religion'. What function do biographies have for religion? What is the relationship between biographical narrative, specifically the life stories of religious founding figures, and the self-image and self-understanding of world religions?

Contact: Wilhelm Hemecker

See also:
Tobias Heinrich
Wolfgang Kreutzer
Caitríona Ní Dhúill (until July 2009)