Biographism
Since the late 19th century, biographism has been an exaggerated modification of the biographical literary method established since the Renaissance, which literary scholars generally reject as unjustified . While the biographical method seeks to achieve a better understanding of the text through knowledge of the life and environment of the empirical text producer, attempts were often made in the 19th century to isolate individual details or fictional characters in literary texts by identifying templates or events in the author's biography to explain. The term has been used disparagingly since the late 19th century and should not be confused with the historical-hermeneutic biographical method.
The word formation is derived from the term biography (from Greek βιογραφία: βíος life and γραφή the writing ) and the suffix -ism (from Greek -ισμός for a mental attitude ).
In principle, the biographical method can be applied to the works of any author. Biographism, which has to be distinguished from this and which literary studies have unanimously rejected as early as 1900, was, for example, often practiced in 19th century Goethe research .
literature
- Tomaševskij, Boris : Literature and Biography . Translated from Russian by Sebastian Donat. In: Jannidis, Fotis ; Lauer, Gerhard ; Martinez, Matias and Winko, Simone (ed.): Texts on the theory of authorship . Stuttgart: Reclam 2000, pp. 46-61. ( ISBN 3-15-018058-9 )
- Tom Kindt / Hans-Harald Müller: What was biographism actually - and what has become of it? An investigation . In: Authorship. Positions and Revisions . Edited by Heinrich Detering. Stuttgart, Weimar 2001. (= German Symposia XVI) pp. 355–375.