ABSTRACT
Biography has emerged in recent years as the premier genre of mainstream literary criticism; spawning multiple subgenres of personal narrative such as memoir, autobiography, and autofiction, the latter a hybrid of memoir and fiction. Like the memoir, biography succeeds because it best "translates" life-properties into narrative. As a genre devoted to "the Life", it lays special claim to what Harold Bloom calls "Literature as a Way of Life" (in the subtitle of The Anatomy of Influence). Nigel Hamilton, a biographer of the Mann brothers, raises an interesting point: most prize-winning literary biographers receive praise as long as they keep their own literary-critical impulses in check. Roland Barthes left people with documents and jettisoned fragments from his writings that invite new practices of critical archiving. And his citations act as emotional anchors, they create a holding environment that temporarily stanches the panics of existential impermanence and solitude.
