Maria Jasińska’s Zagadnienia biografii literackiej (Problems in Literary Biography)

Abstract

The article discusses the most important factors behind transformations in the twentieth-century study of biography, setting as its aim demonstrating the limits on and new paths for biography in relation to three areas: literary practice (working with the examples of Virginia Woolf and Julian Barnes), university pedagogical practice (using the example of the author’s experience), and one of the classic works in the area of the study of biography in Polish literary studies: Maria Jasińska’s 1970 book Zagadnienia biografii literackiej (Problems in Literary Biography), which touches on common ground with the work of Philipp Lejeuene on the biographical “referential pact.” Biography, having been since its inception a hybrid discourse, joining together literariness, a documentary aspect, and a (popular-) scholarly aspect developed in the twentieth century on an unprecedented scale (this tendency is sustained in academic and popular-scientific discourse; the separate genre of biographical reportage also emerged), while the topic also became a focus of interest among modern and postmodern writers who treated the conventions and traditions of biography as pretexts for questions about its philosophical direction.