 Hello and welcome back to NPTEL National Program of Technology Enhanced Learning. As you are aware, these lectures are a series of lectures in English literature and language and these lectures are brought to you by Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institute of Science. The lectures are for students in engineering colleges and Indian Institutes of Technology and where humanities and social sciences are taught as core and elective courses. I am Krishna Barua, I teach English at IIT, Kohati. Today we are in the domain of the lecture series of English literature and language and the module is module 4 and the lecture is on biography which is the second last lecture of the domain. Let us recap on what we have done on this module of literary genres. Genre as we have seen is a specific type of classification used for works of art, literature, music or other creative pursuits and we have also seen in the previous lectures how we have touched on novel, poetry, drama, short story, essay and today we are going to do it on biography. First lecture we looked at the essentials of storytelling about the novel about narrating a tale or a story and the techniques that go beyond narration. In lecture 2 we covered poetry and the poetic devices, arrangement of words, comparisons and the figures of speech which goes into the making of a poem. In lecture 3 if you remember we covered on the performative nature of literature on the genre of drama, an art form that is meant to be performed and the cumulative collaborative effort of design and state craft, lights and props and how the place and setting in which drama is a drama takes place. In lecture 4 we took on the non-fictional prose literature essay form of the genre which is usually very analytic, interpretive and composed of critical literary compositions and subjective view on history and very close to current affairs and literary criticism. Then in lecture 5 we had done on a very interesting genre that is of the short story as a brief fictional prose narrative usually written in prose after short stories have been grouped as stories of fact or stories of fancy upon the way in which the stories are stole. Today of course, we will touch on biography as a form of literary art. The biographer seeks to describe the life and doings of a person, but mere narration of facts as you all know or even the most painstaking fidelity to an collection of huge mass of facts will not make a great biography. You may have the material for narrating but that does not make a biography. So let us see what makes a biography a significant genre by itself. Biographical works in diverse media from literature to film form the genres known as biography. So it does deal with lives of individual. How biographers have portrayed and interpreted individual lives? They do have recorded real lives, the lives of others and of ourselves. So this division between autobiography and biography is quite thin. From the epic of Gilgamesh which was a saga to American splendor, famous biographical artists such as Plutarch, St. Augustine, Sir Walter Rally, Samuel Johnson, Rousseau, Byron, Freud, Lytton Stracci, Virginia Oulf, Orson Welles, St. Huges all of them have dealt with the lives of individual. As Carlisle had said, a well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one. Carlisle, 19th century literature and critic in his life of poet, he had brought out a new landmark in the writing of biography. The pioneer of modern method of analytical biography, Lytton Stracci along with Emil Ludwig of Germany lay stress on a very significant selection of relevant material. So this is more on the selection and omission of relevant materials rejecting others and unnecessary. It rests with the biographer therefore to what to select and what to omit and how well he can present it before the reader. Material works are usually non-fiction but fiction can also be used to portray a person's life. In the course of this module, we have seen how fact and fiction have intermingled and it is almost as if sometimes fact becomes fiction and fiction becomes fact. A great role that is played by imagination and the creative process. Biography is about creativity and when we try to chord a life, it is in the way of the narration of the life that makes a good biographer. Biography is a detailed description no doubt or account of someone's life. It entails more than basic facts, maybe you might follow a very linear conception of childhood, education, work, relationships and death. But it also portrays a subject's experience of these events. Biography does presents a subject's life story highlighting various aspects of his or her life including intimate details of experience and may include an analysis of a subject's personality. So we see that it also goes into the disciplines of psychology into the disciplines of philosophy into the disciplines of literary art. In general, if we see the parallels or the comparisons between autobiography and biography, in the next lecture, we will go into the genre of autobiography. But here let us see how there is a difference between autobiography and biography. In general, the history of autobiography closely parallels the history of biography. It is almost the same. A biography is a life of one person written by another person, by the other, as compared to an autobiography which is a life written by the person who has lived it, his own authentic narration of his own life. The impetus to record people's life, especially great peoples, is very ancient. It is not that recent and can be seen in the records of the Diths of Kings which have been carved in stone centuries before Christ in various sides of the ancient world. Well, so continuing with the way that autobiography and biography merges together, we see that autobiography is written in the first person singular by an I, who is both subject and object of the narrative. So, the subjective and objective perspectives they merge while biography is written about a third person C or he, who is quite the strength for or more or less invisible narrator. He is almost like the omniscient narrator in fiction. However, there are also plenty of instances where writers choose to write about themselves or through third persons like in James Joyce's Portrait of an Artist, Gertrude Stain too. It is therefore important to recognize that there is a continuous and complex relationship. Please mind this, between writing about oneself and writing about another. So, this relationship is going on all the time, the processes are closely analogous if not identical. As Rene Wellek had said, biography is an ancient literary genre, first of all chronologically and logically it is a part of historiography. So, we come close to historiography now, when you record or narrate an event or a life it becomes history does not it. And but here we see that it is almost something which has been evolving from the ancient times. Whether we think of biography as more like history or more like fiction, what we want from it is a vivid sense of the person. This is what Harman Lee had said, well therefore, biography is sometimes regarded as a branch of history as we have already seen. In ancient times there was a record of events of times of people of great men. And when we recall Sir Winston Churchill's magnificent life of his ancestor John Churchill, it can be read as a history as well as a biography because there has been so much of Britain and much of Europe that was being shown there during the war of the Spanish succession. Biography as a part of historiography has to a large extent avoided such arguments. Well, well there is a general recognition today that history and biography are quite distinct forms of literature, even though their domains do merge at one point or the other, but now we find that in literary genres there is a distinction between history and biography. History usually deals in generalizations about a period of time that is about the Renaissance or the modern era or the war period. Biography more typically focuses upon a single human being and deals in the particulars of the person's life, notwithstanding even if it touches upon the events of that period even then we find that it does deal with the single human being. Now therefore, both biography and history however are often concerned with the past and it is in the hunting down, in the evaluating and selection of sources that they are akin. We have already referred earlier that there is a huge mass of materials data of materials that are being given to the biographer and it is in the selection process that makes a successful biographer. In this sense biography can be regarded as a craft it is almost inventing the truth and you find that it is regarded as a craft, a special creative process rather than an art. Techniques of research, a lot of research has to go into the writing of a biography and general rules for testing evidence can be learned by anyone and thus need involve comparative little of that personal commitment associated with art. So, within the bounds of given data let us see how the biographer seeks to transform plain information into illumination which has to come alive, it has to be a living document. A good biography is always something which people go on reading, but one which is just a documentary evidence people will keep shy of reading it. If he invents or suppresses material in order to create an effect he fails truth that is also to be taken into consideration if he is content to recount facts he fails art. So, therefore, he is in a dilemma right and therefore, this tension between the requirements of authenticity and the necessity for an imaginative ordering of materials. Well as we have gone through this course and this module we have all the time emphasized upon the meaning of imagination, the meaning of the process of writing, the meaning of the form of writing and the techniques which are involved in it. Literature is about this, literature is how do you create something out of the material that you have got and to achieve life lightness is perhaps the best exemplified in the biographical problem of the time. Well, let us go into as we had done in the early lectures of how biography evolved into the modern text or in a modern genre. We have seen that sagas could can be seen as the beginnings of the Biographical Act. Sagas are the long oral history stories of heroic achievement that have involved accounts of a series of incidents. The epic of Gilgamesh is a saga of Gilgamesh's journeys and it impacts biographical portraiture even today. Examples date back as far back as the impulse of Egyptian, Babylonian and Assyrian kings to record the digs and wealth in their own world. With this exception biographies were in the classical and medieval period. The closest examples are the meditations of Aurelis and Julius Caesar that had autobiographical dimensions not to talk of biographical, but to a much closer to philosophy and history. The word biography itself when we look at the etymological meaning of the word is formed from the Greek words meaning life and depiction. So, how you depict and how you depict life? D.R. Stuart said that biography excludes historians point of view and home life. Educated Greeks and Romans were biographers because there was a passion in them to record the the the lives of great man because they could deliver a new logic or write about significant people of the day in and in the past. In ancient times the only professional biographers were the compilers. Plutarch said that biography let him treat history as a mirror because he could help his own life by looking at others. Well, as we have already mentioned biography has been and will always be regarded as a branch of history and earlier biographical writings such as the 15th century French Council of State or George Covindice's 16th century life of Thomas Cardinal Olsey have often been treated as historical material rather than literary works. Some entries in ancient Chinese chronicles included biographical sketches embedded in the Roman historian Thesedos most famous biography of the Emperor Stibarus. Also in India we have the journals of Babur and we find that and also some of the ways that the Mughal Empire ruled. In the 18th century we find that this biography as a genre really took its form James Boswell knew comparatively little about Samuel Johnson when he tried when he wrote his lives of Samuel Johnson and earlier years it is one of the greatnesses of his life of Samuel Johnson published in 1791 that he succeeded without inventing matter or deceiving the reader in giving the sense of a life progressively unfolding notwithstanding that the early period was not much touched upon. In the 19th and 20th centuries biographies have been more carefully researched than in earlier times and are sometimes massive and scholarly but the biography has also become a form of popular literature and it has become very breezy and anecdotal. It is almost like a story form in a form of a fiction films and television documentaries are also forms of contemporary biography. Well, so coming to the 20th century when we are looking into the way that this genre has flourished we will see that it becomes separatist of psychological revelation. In our next lecture we will go to autobiography we will see how the autobiographical impulse plus the biographical impulse has taken on and enlarged the scope of creativity. Biographers of the 20th century have had at their disposal the psychological theories of Freud and of his followers and rivals. So, there are the different perspectives the different dimensions which are being looked at and are being looked attended to in the writing of biography. The extent to which this new biographical tools these are absolutely novel biographical tools and when we look at the psychological understanding of a person's life then we see that the biographer has a different way of unlocking the personality of the person that he has attended to or he has written about. Under one hand some biographers have deployed analysis of behavior symbols interpretation based on the edifice complex detection of Jungian archetypal patterns of behavior the collective unconscious what have you and the like. We have two very well known biographies Eric Erikson's young man Luther and Gandhi's shoot on the origins of militant non-violence in 1969. The principles of composition when we go into look into it biography seems uninterested in questioning the principles of composition upon which it is based which is all since it draws upon approaches to writing in both history and literature. Writing biography as writing any historical account involves the use of literary techniques in the beginning of this module I had said that when we study literature and it is imperative that you have to study language and when we study language it is imperative that you have to study literature. So the manner and the method both this form is equally important and they coexist side by side in the appreciation of literature in whatever journal. So writing biography as writing any historical account involves the use of literary techniques it does have its own code of rules and is subject to aesthetic requirements in both style and structure. Narrative common to both historical and fictional writing is the central theoretical concept how you tell the story how you narrate whether it is mimesis whether it is digesses and understanding the nature of narrative in biography which is a hybrid genre by itself is grounded in history but shares many of the characteristics of fiction. Therefore now we have three triad of you can say interest or areas one is biography then we have history then the other part is fiction is fundamental when considering the aesthetics of composition that underpin a poetics of writing very important while dealing with biography and autobiography is the way that you compose time how handling time the biography is more constrained than the novelist because in the conventional biography the subjects progress from childhood onwards follows a predetermined order does not it because you follow almost a linear development you cannot just start with the middle and go with the past the duration the pace the positioning of episodes allow the biographer a little more flexibility but on the whole it remains similarly fixed in a temporal design. So the design is almost temporal and it also linear and the biographer has to have his own understanding of the flexibility of the technique of how to present it. The novelist like the painter starts with a blank canvas let us see how we can compare the biographer to a sculptor not to a painter but the novelist we can compare to a painter fills it out on her own terms and judges when the narrative is complete. The biographer like the sculptor is faced not with an empty space but with a mass of material more or less malleable more or less intractable with which to work here we can say there is a big difference between autobiography and biography autobiography can be compared to a self-portrait made by a painter because the painter becomes the model as well as the creator of himself while in a biography he is more like a sculptor than a painter because he is trying to form out of material which is already there from which to work on. So the raw materials of biography moreover are presented on other people's terms they are partial and often of uncertain provenance sometimes there may be interviews there may be ways other people have talked about him there may be the autobiographical element to where the person itself himself may have written about his life offering an unreliable basis from which to fashion the narrative towards its predetermined end. Where we accept and enjoy the aesthetic completements of a well wrought fiction part of a response to even the most detailed well researched biography is to be made aware of what is not there. So when we look at a well researched biography it is not the documentation of the real facts it is of the things which is not there of all the temporal gaps that the biographer has left unfilled. So these are the things that the biographer has to be very careful of. But difficulties in the way of writing a good biography are indeed great often a biographer has at his disposal an enormous mass of materials such for example is the case with the biographer of Gandhiji or Rabindranath Tagore here his problem is one of selecting again what to choose and what to select and what to omit. He must focus attention on facts that will reveal some essential traits of character or some aspect of personality. In selecting this epiphanies you can call it those heightened moments of time or heightened moments of events or aside of the personality moments of being as it is called. This revelatory experience described by Wordsworth Joyce and Virginia Woolf are the most subtle and elusive challenges that their biographers encounter. So what is this epiphanic moments that one has to record or have to narrate or have to show their instances of acute temporality reflected through an autobiographical lens offering the biographer potential access to the innermost workings of the subjects imagination. He becomes a poet himself he becomes the subject himself in writing about the person he has attended to. Virginia Woolf to looks back on childhood memories as the main source of those emotional exceptional moments going back to childhood whether it is painful whether it is pleasant all these are the memories or on retrospective lens that you look into the way that your life has projected. As he variously calls the moments of great intensity moments which as he gets older take on the character of a revelation or so it becomes like an illumination and a revelation of some order a token of some real thing behind appearances. And I make it real by putting it into words here again we are at the temporal meeting point of memory and imagination even Boswell's Dr. Johnson is at bottom a tissue of tributes and penigree. There is no merit in exaggerating the virtues of concealing the defects of a great man he must hold reality with straight forward veracity there cannot be any white washing there cannot be any lying about what the person has been little stretches eminent victorians if he is wise he will adopt subtle settler strategy he will attack his subject in unexpected places this is what little stretchy had said he will shoot a sudden revealing light into obscure recesses hitherto undivide. Well, so now we come to a very interesting part of biography which is biographical fiction. Well, biographical fiction is fiction which takes a historical individual as a subject and recreates an element of their life turning it into a fictional narrative usually firm or novel. Art specially painting has always acted as a catalyst for literature as we see in summer set moms the moon and sixpence which was written in 1919 Michael Cunningham's The Hours which is based again on Virginia Wool's novel Mrs. Dalloway. So, here we come to the domain of art historiographic fiction one of the most significant trends in literature has been the cross fertilization between the literary and the visual arts. In fact, literature and art have always been considered as sister subjects this rich relationship is maintained through the use of illusion symbolism allegory and representation it is more the poetics of representation the aesthetics of representation that this two streams shared the common ground literature and art. While such relationship exists between literature and painting Woolf, Virginia Woolf attest that painting and writing have much to tell each other they have much in common the novelist after all wants to make us see the same thing that we have of the gauge or the site in which we see the world. Well, these are subsequently resulted in the formation of a new literary sub genre which we may call art historiographic right fiction and the narrative often features artist as central characters. The fictive narrative fills up the gaps left blank by history and commenced on the process of artistic creation be it that of writing or painting. We have Vincent van Gogh's Arvingstone's Last for Life Tracy Savalia's Girl with a Pearl Earring in 1999 is perhaps the most well known reimagining of Dutch painter Johannes Burmese work. This novel is based on Burmese famous painting Girl with a Pearl Earring which was painted around the 17th century and of the 17th century. This is the painting by Burmese Girl with a Pearl Earring out of this the novel had come out which is almost like a Kunstel Roman. Kunstel Roman you can say is a part is a sort of evolution of the creative process the growth of the artist based on the German Bildungsroman which is like a story of initiation. We can give you another example of Arvingstone's Last for Life which I just mentioned based on the life of Vincent van Gogh. This is a painting by Vincent van Gogh and which becomes a literary biography some of the paintings which were referred to in the biography and Michelangelo's compelling portrait in Arvingstone the Agony and the Ecstasy published in 1961. His sculptures this was the Sistine's apple in Rome. Then we have Mola Rouges based on the life of French artist Henry Toulouse-Lautrape, P. R. D. La Moules and this is again the creative the way that the artist works the innovations the bottlenecks the different ways of the life that takes place a literary biography. Some must have poems the Mone and Sixpence we had just mentioned just now based on the life of Paul Gogh some of his paintings here one of his paintings here. Examples of the ways in which art and artists have acted as material for literature. The Kunstelroman which we had just said and we have given example to you is a type of Bildungsroman a novel where the protagonist undergoes an education. So from the stage of initiation to the stage of understanding or enlightenment in which the writer charts the course of an artist undergoing an evolution from nascent stirrings to full artistic voice. James Joyce a portrait of the artist as a young man another one of Somerset mom's novel of human bondage. But a good biography is the passport to immortality no doubt the individual passes into history does not he and lives forever. Father Moy a biographer gives us the social picture of an age it is a window to which we look into interesting segments of a period that urge us on to novel work. Hence Carlisle says that history is the sense of innumerable biographies. So even though we draw a line between history and biography yet we know that history is the sense of innumerable biographies. Let us look into a very popular firm made out of this biography A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nassar Princeton mathematician John Nash which was based on the life of John Nash. Now Nassar's main source of information was a large number of interviews. Nash himself did not cooperate at all the biography is unauthorized to say the least though his ex-wife and constant companion Alicia Nash and other family members and friends did. So here Nassar gives an intelligent every intelligent intelligent understandable exposition of his mathematical ideas as well and a picture of the schizophrenia that is evocative but decidedly unromantic. This is from the firm A Beautiful Mind Russell Crowe was the actor and saluting survivors John Forbes Nash of how he escaped the Nobel award but later he got it for economics game theory how here there is a recount of his childhood Johnny was always different from John Nassar's sister it was based on interviews my parents knew he was different and they knew he was bright he always wanted to do things his way mother insisted I do things for him that I include him in my friendships but I was not too keen on showing off my somewhat odd brother. The issues therefore that we are going to deal with here now is how is it that biographies and autobiographies play such a contested popular role in contemporary western culture from biopics to blogs from memoir to documa docu drama how is it that biography is integral to western ideals of individuality and ideals of democracy the question of identity the question of individuality the question of nationalism which many say are western concepts of modernism identify if we can if you get time to five characteristics of a biographer and give specific examples of when they demonstrated this characteristics or how and when you pick you can pick up those qualities and you can pinpoint them and read and interpret the text accordingly focusing on the personal life and professional life what human qualities were most influential in shaping the way a person lived and influenced his or her times so you can when you read or try to interpret a biography like to see the human qualities the ways which had motivated the person on his in his life and older person or mentor is often very important in shaping the lives of gifted people by providing guidance and encouragement explain if you have read any biography which has said that a person a book or an event has influenced and how it has led to his becoming what he was then we can trace the development or the evolution of the character in that way key source texts in this lecture have been Abraham's grocery of literary texts towards the poetics of literary biography by Michael Benton reflection on biography but back cider and Margaret Drabel this book the concise Oxford companion to English literature very helpful book needs Nigel Hamilton's a brief history biography then literature and introduction to fiction poetry drama and rope Pope the English studies book and Amy Ciron just studying autobiographical a critical study I end this lecture with a beautiful poem by William Butler is who Irish poet the beginning of 20th century and this is very very representative of the role of biography and of the way of narration of a life when you are old when you are old and gray and full of sleep and nodding fire the fire take down this book and slowly read and dream of the soft look your eyes had once and of the shadows deep how many loved your moments of glad grace and loved your beauty with love false or true but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you and loved the sorrows of your singing face and bending down beside the glowing bars mama a little sadly how love fled and paced upon the mountains overhead and hid his face amid the crowd of stars thank you