Biographical Criticism (English)

Biographical Criticism Definition: • It is a critical approach to literature in which information about an author’s life and background is used to better understand his works. • A writer's life may shed light on his or her literature and the literature of the era. • It is necessary to know about the author and the political, economical, and sociological context of his times in order to truly understand his literature. • It focuses on links between a work’s content and the writer’s life; often use the writer’s intentions, experiences, motives, or beliefs to interpret his/her literary texts. • While few critics today would completely ignore the author’s biography, recent developments in theory have complicated our view of subjectivity, and thus of the relations between a writer’s life and work. • It seeks to illuminate the deeper meaning of themes, conflicts, characters, settings and literary allusions based on the author's own concerns and conflicts. • Real life experience can help shape (either directly or indirectly) an author's work. • Understanding an author's life can help us better understand the work. • Facts from the author's life are used to help the reader better understand the work; the focus is always on the literary work under investigation. • It "begins with the simple but central insight that literature is written by actual people and that understanding an author's life can help readers more thoroughly comprehend the work." • However, a biographical critic must be careful not to take the biographical facts of a writer's life too far in criticizing the works of that writer: the biographical critic "focuses on explicating the literary work by using the insight provided by knowledge of the author's life.... biographical should amplify the meaning of the text, not drown it out with irrelevant material." • It shouldn’t be interchanged with Autobiographical which is often defined, “the biography of a person narrated by that person”, or “the story of a person’s life as told by him or herself”. • How to . . . -Investigate the author’s life, using biographies, autobiographies, letters, etc. -Consider how the author’s life helps the reader understand the text. -Consider how the author’s beliefs and values may or may not reflect the values of his or her time. Proponents: • Samuel Johnson: Lives of the Poets (1779–81) was the first thorough-going exercise in biographical criticism, the attempt to relate a writer’s background and life to his works. • Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve: was a literary critic and one of the major figures of French literary history. One of Sainte-Beuve's major critical contentions was that in order understand an artist it was first necessary to understand that artist's biography.

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Effects: • New Critics refer to the historical / biographical critic's belief that the meaning or value of a work may be determined by the author's intention as "the intentional fallacy." They believe that this approach tends to reduce art to the level of biography and make it relative (to the times) rather than universal. • Intentional Fallacy addresses the assumption that the meaning intended by the author of a literary work is of primary importance. • This school of criticism assimilates "biographies" in literary criticism. Biographies came to the forefront, and understanding the author’s life can help us understand his work, and they are intimately inter-related. • Biographical criticism is different from biography. Biography is a science studying an account of people’s lives. It "focuses on explicating the literary work by using the insight provided by knowledge of the author’s life." • Advantages: -It helps the reader to understand elements the author uses in his work, such as words, allusions, themes, characters...etc. -The author's background often adds significance to the written work. -It helps the reader to discover the author's audience and intention. Disadvantages: -The author's life is not necessarily the same as the work's contents.(reliance of the source material) -Unsound sources of information about the author's life. -Literary work should be studied in conjunction with author’s life for full meaning and appreciation. -Correlation of events in the text to the author’s life should be done carefully.