| Popis: |
Over recent decades a lively debate has taken place, both among classicists and scholars of modern literature, about the legitimacy of biography as a subject of study, about whether it is a separable genre and the relationship that it enjoys with other forms of writing. Early in the twentieth century, biography was often regarded with some suspicion in academic circles. The eminent historian of the ancient world Arnaldo Momigliano completed several examples of the form. Personally, though, he had profound reasons for distrusting it, and as a professional historian he clearly found it not simply misleading, but sometimes profoundly irritating. To him it seemed to promise a guarantee of veracity it too often failed to fulfil. Momigliano on the origins of Greek biography: are Plato and Xenophon proper biographers? They often seem to recount an embellished or “imagined” version of the facts, but how much does that matter? Momigliano thought that it did. Looking at the work of Bernard Williams, however, we can see that notions of the truth have not always been the same, changing as they do over time. Some more recent critics, such as Thomas Hagg, have come to recognise this and to adjust their assessment of ancient biography accordingly. Hagg takes his cue from Hermione Lee’s idea that the guiding rule of biography is that it breaks all of the others, especially those espoused by critics in hock to restrictive definitions. Biography not simply is, but has always been, malleable. Armed with this notion, we can turn back to certain ancient biographers or schools of biography with unblinkered eyes. |
