August, 2015

By: Robbie Liza E. Caytiles

Biographical Approach

Biographical criticism uses details about an author's personal life to analyse the author's works.

It relies on autobiographies, correspondence, and other primary materials about the author and is a form of historical criticism.

What is Biographical Approach?

Critics doing biographical analysis carefully examine incidents in the lives of authors and try to identify events, settings, objects, buildings, people, etc. found in the novels with historical sources. 

The difficultly with this sort of criticism, and reason it has somewhat fallen out of favour, is that fictionalized accounts, even when they may have been inspired by actual events and people, often suffer a sea change when they are introduced into novels.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Works well for some which are obviously political or biographical in nature.

It also is necessary to take a historical approach in order to place allusions in there proper classical, political, or biblical background.

Advantages:

"The intentional fallacy". Tends to reduce art to the level of biography and make it relative rather than universal.

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.

Disadvantages:

Origin of the Approach

As early as the nineteenth century, scholars considered literary texts against the background of the author’s biography. The aim was to find references to the author’s life, education and socio-cultural environment in a literary work.

Ever since the French critic Roland Barthes announced the “death of the author” in 1968, the biographical approach has lost its appeal for many scholars.

Barthes and critics following him have argued that an author’s biography is irrelevant since the meaning of a text only emerges in the reading process and the reader thus becomes the real ‘author’ of the text.

One could argue against this radical viewpoint that there are texts where knowledge of an author’s biography can sometimes help us understand the text better because otherwise we would not be able to decipher certain allusions or references. Bearing this knowledge in mind, it is then interesting to see where the literary text deviates from references to the author’s real life.

Questions to Biographical

Approach

A. What aspects of the author’s personal life are relevant to this story?

B. Which of the author’s stated beliefs are reflected in the work?

C. Does the writer challenge or support the values of her contemporaries?

D. What seem to be the author’s major concerns? Do they reflect any of the writer’s personal experiences?

E. Do any of the events in the story correspond to events experienced by the author?

F. Do any of the characters in the story correspond to real people?

The Glass MenagerieTennessee Williams