Page 304 - Contribution To Phenomenology

Chapter 12

Biography as a Cultural Discipline

Mano Daniel
Florida Atlantic University

Abstract The biographical subject is the cultural object par
excellence. By examining how biographers go about the task of
studying and assembling their biographical texts, we will acquire a
better appreciation of the nature of cultural objects and the
appropriate philosophical and methodological strategies that facilitate
the description and explanation of such objects. I begin by refle-
cting upon the practice of biographical writing in order to illu-
minate and explicate some of the salient features and theoretical
concerns of biographical writing as experienced by practicing biogra-
phers. I then canvass and discuss ways in which biographies play
relevant methodological and cultural roles.

There is little systematic philosophical reflection on the practice of
biographical writing, or life-writing, even though, as Jeffery Meyers
reports, it is one of the "major Hterary genres of the twentieth century."
This is surprising since the practice's popularity and pervasiveness has had
a profound intellectual and theoretical impact. Biographies make up an
significant proportion of books published in the humanities, social sciences
and even in the history of science where they function not simply as
works of reference, but as an important consequence of, and resource
for, cultural research.
This paucity of theoretical reflection may be engendered by the
polymorphous nature of the practice itself, which is more a site or
region—"bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on
the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium"^—in which a cluster

^ Michael Holroyd, "Literary and Historical Biography," in New Directions in
Biography, edited by Anthony M. Friedson (Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press,
1979), 23.
297
M. Daniel and L. Embree (eds.), Phenomenology of the Cultural Disciplines, 297-317.
© 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.