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Operating at the juncture between reality and fiction is the genre of biography; or so Samuel Johnson must have thought, when he defined a biographer as a “writer of lives”, “a relator not of the history of nations, but of the actions of particular persons”. [emphasis added, RA] From this it becomes clear just how much of a paradigmatic value the biographical genre holds in relation to the remaining literary genres. From the homodiegetic or heterodiegetic and (more often than not) unreliable narrator to the “most authentick” collection of letters compiled by a devoted editor or the deathbed dictations from the parting biographical subject, biography has it all. The drama, the history, the comedy and the odd tattered memento...
The seminar seeks to re-discover the genre of literary biography in the eighteenth century in its aesthetic and canonical importance and to re-claim it as one of the literary scholar’s essential vade mecum. The reading choice features a selection of Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets, James Boswell’s immortalization of the biographer in his Life of Johnson, and as a parting gesture to the eighteenth century, William Wordsworth’s The Prelude. Additional titles will be announced at the start of term.
The examination form (MAP Mod. 4) for this seminar will be a take-home exam comprising questions from the lecture “Survey of English Literature” and an essay question from the seminar. |
