Narrating the Human and Singing the Sacred Song: Notes toward an Aesthetic of Biography
(Article in English/Artykuł w języku angielskim)
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.
Keywords
biography; critical theory; theory of biography; Tzvetan Todorov; Georg Lukács; verisimilitude; prose; genre
References
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Poetics of Prose. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977.
Bryant, John. “The Biographical Re-Turn: Writing Melville Biography and the Example of Women.” In: The New Melville Studies, edited by Cody Marrs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
James, Henry. “The Art of Fiction.” In: Partial Portraits. London: Macmillan and Co., 1919.
Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971.
Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Alexander Pope. London: F. J. Du Roveray, 1806.
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York United States
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3093-7561
John Matteson (born March 3, 1961) is an American professor of English and legal writing at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. He won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for his first book Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father. Matteson graduated with an A.B. in history from Princeton University in 1983 after completing an 178-page-long senior thesis titled "The Confederate Cotton Embargo, 1861-1862: A Study in States' Rights." He then received a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1986, and a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University in 1999.[4] He served as a law clerk for U.S. District Court Judge Terrence W. Boyle before working as a litigation attorney at Titchell, Maltzman, Mark, Bass, Ohleyer & Mishel in San Francisco and with Maupin, Taylor, Ellis & Adams in Raleigh, North Carolina. He has written articles for a wide variety of publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New England Quarterly, Streams of William James, and Leviathan. His second book, The Lives of Margaret Fuller was published in January 2012 and received the 2012 Ann M. Sperber Biography Award as the year's outstanding biography of a journalist or other figure in media. It was also a finalist for the inaugural Plutarch Award, the prize for best biography of the year as chosen by the Biographers International Organization (BIO), and was shortlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. His W. W. Norton & Company annotated edition of Little Women was published in November 2015, featuring many exclusive photographs from Alcott's childhood home, Orchard House, as well as numerous illustrations and stills from the various film adaptations. Matteson's most recent book, A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation, was published in February 2021. Matteson appeared in the 2018 documentary Orchard House: Home of Little Women.
Matteson is a former treasurer of the Melville Society and is a member of the Louisa May Alcott Society's advisory board. Matteson is a fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society and has served as the deputy director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography.
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