The document discusses the biographical approach to literary criticism. It involves analyzing a work based on details of the author's life from sources like autobiographies and letters. Critics examine events, people, and settings in the author's life to identify influences in their works, though fictional works may differ substantially from real events. While it works for explicitly political or biographical works, it risks reducing art to just biography. It also emerged in the 19th century but lost popularity after arguments that the author's intent is less important than the reader's interpretation. However, an author's biography can sometimes provide useful context to understand references in their works. The document provides questions critics may ask about an author's life and influences related to their works.

1. August, 2015
By: Robbie Liza E. Caytiles
Biographical Approach

2. Biographical criticism uses details about
an author's personal life to analyse the
author's works.
 It relies on autobiographies,
correspondence, and other primary
materials about the author and is a form of
historical criticism.
What is Biographical Approach?

3. Critics doing biographical
analysis carefully examine
incidents in the lives of authors
and try to identify events,
settings, objects, buildings,
people, etc. found in the novels
with historical sources.

4. The difficultly with this sort of
criticism, and reason it has
somewhat fallen out of favour,
is that fictionalized accounts,
even when they may have
been inspired by actual events
and people, often suffer a sea
change when they are
introduced into novels.

5. Advantages and
Disadvantages

6. Works well for some which are obviously
political or biographical in nature.
It also is necessary to take a historical
approach in order to place allusions in
there proper classical, political, or biblical
background.
Advantages:

7. "The intentional fallacy". Tends to reduce art to the
level of biography and make it relative rather than
universal.
New Critics refer to the historical / biographical critic's
belief that the meaning or value of a work may be
determined by the author's intention as "the
intentional fallacy." They believe that this approach
tends to reduce art to the level of biography and make
it relative (to the times) rather than universal.
Disadvantages:

8. Origin of the
Approach

9. As early as the nineteenth century,
scholars considered literary texts
against the background of the author’s
biography. The aim was to find
references to the author’s life,
education and socio-cultural
environment in a literary work.
Ever since the French critic Roland
Barthes announced the “death of the
author” in 1968, the biographical
approach has lost its appeal for many
scholars.

10. Barthes and critics following
him have argued that an
author’s biography is
irrelevant since the meaning
of a text only emerges in
the reading process and the
reader thus becomes the
real ‘author’ of the text.

11. One could argue against this radical viewpoint
that there are texts where knowledge of an
author’s biography can sometimes help us
understand the text better because otherwise
we would not be able to decipher certain
allusions or references. Bearing this knowledge
in mind, it is then interesting to see where the
literary text deviates from references to the
author’s real life.

12. Questions to
Biographical
Approach

13. A. What aspects of the author’s personal life are relevant to this
story?
B. Which of the author’s stated beliefs are reflected in the
work?
C. Does the writer challenge or support the values of her
contemporaries?
D. What seem to be the author’s major concerns? Do they
reflect any of the writer’s personal experiences?
E. Do any of the events in the story correspond to events
experienced by the author?
F. Do any of the characters in the story correspond to real
people?

14. The Glass Menagerie
Tennessee Williams