Narrating the Human and Singing the Sacred Song: Notes toward an Aesthetic of Biography
Narrating the Human and Singing the Sacred Song: Notes toward an Aesthetic of Biography

Summary/Abstract: Drawing upon the theoretical writings of Tzvetan Todorov and Georg Lukács on the subject of the novel, this essay argues for more widespread recognition of the biography as a literary genre. It frames the genre of biography as a genre of radical incompleteness, discussing the search for verisimilitude and the tendency toward fragmentation in the biographer’s pursuit – a quality that describes not only the biographer’s sources, but also the contingent, broken nature of the intellectual and emotional space that both the biographical subject and the biographer herself inhabit.

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