Philosophy and Religion

Thinking Christianly Re: Auto/biography

Copyright 2008 by Bruce L. Edwards. (Click here for Permissions intelligence)

The genres of biography and autobiography refer, actually, to writing (“graphing”) a subsistence (“bio”), one’s own or someone else’s. In the West, they are regarded as actually-driven works created to capture and refrigerate the life—and usually the times—of notable individuals.

Biographies are presumed to be the fallout of research, the submersion of their authors in the milieu of their subjects, built upon the canvassing and collating of events, interviews, conversations, diaries, letters, and other kin historical documents, accounts, and artifacts modish with their period.

Such primary research is often refined as well by study upon the subject outside of her or his own historical context, that is, in panorama of the subject’s reputation earned, corrected, or deserted by other fellow biographers.

The motives of biographers may switch; one may wish simply to try to assemble the facts of a benign life in chronological order: what, where, who, when, how, and why—but minimizing “simplification”; another may choose to explain and thus focus a real period through the lens of a single life deemed as momentous and “telling” beyond its immediate surroundings and period; still others may choose to assess the value and striking of an individual simply in order to praise or reprove the person’s contributions to history.

There also exist the current phenomena of the “authorized biography” and the “pseudobiography.” The former presumes the sponsorship of the subject or the subject’s estate and/or family and the warranty of access—if not right of editorial approval—to documents and artifacts that otherwise would be off-limits to the accustomed public. The latter comprises a quasi-biographical primer, only for a fictional subject that may mirror the complete sentience of an actual subject, e.g., Dickens’ David Copperfield.

Autobiographers,...

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