ABSTRACT

This chapter shows how diffuse, dividual, entwined, and embedded the most prototypically Western individuals already are, by examining how they are constructed in and through fictive relationships. It focuses on the genres of contemporary American and English ‘literary’ or ‘true’ biography, as defined by self-proclaimed ‘literary’ or ‘true’ biographers. The chapter examines the intertextual methods of biographical research and the epistemology that underlies it, using books and periodicals on twentieth-century biographical method, criticism, and theory: books with titles like Biography as High Adventure, Life into Art, and Reassembling the Dust. According to biographers, biographical construction is the process of converting all the material into the skin-bound, autonomous, agentive, bourgeois Western subjects that appear in finished biographies. Many biographers speak of being taken over, controlled, or possessed by the subject, particularly in the phase of writing where they feel that they are “living” through the subject.