Biography forms an intersection point between academia, art and entertainment. It resists allocation to any one academic discipline and combines literary, historical, cultural and philosophical perspectives. Partly as a result of this interdisciplinarity, biography was long underestimated by professional scholars and only gradually became an acceptable object of academic study. Although there is now a lively debate on biography in the anglophone and francophone spheres, the German-speaking world still suffers from a theoretical deficit which stands in marked contrast to the genre’s general popularity. Biographies are written and read without reflection on the conditions, difficulties and limitations of biographical research.
 

 

One of the aims of this research strand is to work towards a definition of the term ‘biography’ with reference to current international debates. Biography raises a plethora of questions, from the epistemological to the aesthetic, from the historiographical to those of genre, source material and ethics. These will be considered with a view to closing the existing theoretical gaps. Topics and questions to be addressed include:

•      Biographical truth between fact and fiction

•      Biography as narrative - its relationship to literary forms

•      The dividing lines between biography and related genres

•      The status of source material and archives

•      The relationship of biographers to their subjects

•      Art works and their genesis as biographical source material in 
       biographies of artists

•      Biography’s contribution to the understanding of literary works and their 
       production

•      Biography’s role in the definition and awareness of the modern self

•      The formation of moral and political role models in biography

•      Biography from the perspective of gender theory

•      Postmodern criticism of biography’s basic assumptions

•      Biography between the private and public spheres

•      The significance of biography for collective memory

•      Biography as a medium of cultural transfer

In reflecting on these topics and questions, the research strand aims to bring closer together the methods and insights of many different disciplines, including sociology, history, literature, ethnology, gender studies and psychoanalysis. These theoretical considerations will also serve to stimulate and support the Institute’s individual biographical projects.  

There will also be a focus within this research strand on liquidated and newly (re)invented biographies. A further project engages with biography and film.

 

 

Contact:

Esther Marian
Manfred Mittermayer
Hannes Schweiger
Bernhard Fetz (until May 2009)