Interpretive Biography

Interpretive Biography
ASSUMPTIONS OF THE METHOD
Contributors: Norman K. Denzin

Print Pub. Date: 1989
Online Pub. Date:
Print ISBN: 9780803933583
Online ISBN: 9781412984584
DOI: 10.4135/9781412984584
Print pages: 13-28
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Research Methods. Please note that the
pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.
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[p. 13 ]
ASSUMPTIONS OF THE METHOD

The interpretive biographical method, as indicated in the preface, involves the studied
use and collection of personal-life documents, stories, accounts, and narratives which
describe turning-point moments in individuals' lives (Denzin, 1989a, chapter 2; 1989b,
chapter 8). The subject matter of the biographical method is the life experiences of a
person. When written in the first person, it is called an autobiography, life story, or life
history (Allport, 1942, chapter 6). When written by another person, observing the life in
question, it is called a biography. My intentions in this chapter are to offer a series of
examples of autobiographical and biographical writing and then to make a number of
critical points about the method and its assumptions. But, first, a brief aside.
The Subject and the Biographical Method

From its birth, modern, qualitative, interpretive sociology which I date with Weber's
meditations on verstehen and method (1922/1947; 1922/1949) has been haunted by
a metaphysics of presence (Derrida, 1972, p. 250), which asserts that real, concrete
subjects live lives with meaning and these meanings have a concrete presence in the
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lives of [p. 14 ] these people. This belief in a real subject who is present in the world
has led sociologists to continue to search for a method (Sartre, 1963) that would allow
them to uncover how these subjects give subjective meaning to their life experiences
(Schutz, 1932/1967). This method would rely upon the subjective verbal and written
expressions of meaning given by the individuals being studied, these expressions being
windows into the inner life of the person. Since Dilthey (1900/1976), this search has led
to a perennial focus in the human sciences on the autobiographical approach and its
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interpretive biographical variants, including hermeneutics.
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Interpretive Biography: ASSUMPTIONS OF THE

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Derrida (1972) has contributed to the understanding that there is no clear window
into the inner life of a person, for any window is always filtered through the glaze of
language, signs, and the process of signification. And language, in both its written
and spoken forms, is always inherently unstable, in flux, and made up of the traces of
other signs and symbolic statements. Hence there can never be a clear, unambiguous
statement of anything, including an intention or a meaning. My task in this book is to
reconcile this concern with the metaphysics of presence, and its representations with
a commitment to the position that interpretive sociologists and anthropologists study
real people who have real-life experiences in the social world (Turner and Bruner, 1986;
Plath, 1987).
Exemplars
Consider the following excerpts from some classic and contemporary autobiographical
and biographical texts.
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
Augustine (1960, p. 43) opens his Confessions:
You are great, O Lord, and greatly to be praised: great is your power
and to your wisdom there is no limit. And man who is part of your
creation, wishes to praise you
In her quasi-autobiographical A Room of One's Own (1929, p. 76), Virginia Woolf
comments on the values that shaped her writing about her own life:
[p. 15 ]
It is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values
which have been made by the other sex it is the masculine values
that prevail.
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Carolyn Kay Steedman (1987, pp. 6, 7, 9) situates her life story in Landscape for a
Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives, in her mother's life:
My mother's longing shaped my own childhood. From a Lancashire mill
town and a working-class twenties childhood she came away wanting:
fine clothes, glamour, money; to be what she wasn't [p. 6] I grew
up in the 1950s [p. 7] The very devices that are intended to give
expression to childhoods like mine and my mother's actually deny their
expression. The problem with most childhoods lived out in households
maintained by social class III (manual), IV, and V parents is that they
simply are not bad enough to be worthy of attention.
John Cheever, the novelist, pays some attention to the details of his life, which might
otherwise not have been worthy of attention:
I have been a storyteller since the beginning of my life, rearranging
facts in order to make them more interesting and sometimes more
significant. I have turned my eccentric old mother into a woman of
wealth and position and made my father a captain at sea. I have
improvised a background for myself genteel, traditional and it is
generally accepted. But what are the bare facts, if I were to write them.
The yellow house, the small north living room with a player piano and
on a card table, a small stage where I made scenery and manipulated
puppets. The old mahogany gramophone with its crank, its pitiful power
of reproduction. In the dining room an overhead lamp made from the
panels of a mandarin coat. Against the wall the helm of my father's
sailboat long gone, inlaid with mother of pearl (Susan Cheever, 1984,
p. 12).
Stanley, the young subject of The Jack-Roller (Shaw, 1930/1966), perhaps the most
famous sociological autobiography, and the victim of a bad childhood, starts his story
with the following words:
To start out in life, everyone has his chances some good and some
very bad. Some are born with good fortunes, beautiful homes, good
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educated parents; while others are born in ignorance, poverty and

crime. In other words, Fate begins to guide our lives even before
we are born My start [p. 16 ] was handicapped by a no-good,
ignorant, and selfish stepmother, who thought only of herself and her
own children.
Nine pages into his autobiography, The Words (1964/1981, pp. 1819), Jean-Paul
Sartre locates himself in the family history he has been telling:
The death of Jean-Baptiste [his father] was the big event in my life: it
sent my mother back to her chains and gave me my freedom. There is
no good father, that's the rule I left behind me a young man who did
not have time to be my father and who could now be my son. Was it a
good thing or a bad? I don't know. But I readily subscribe to the verdict
of the eminent psychoanalyst: I have no Superego.
BIOGRAPHIES
Helmut R. Wagner (1983, p. 5) begins his intellectual biography of Alfred Schutz with
the following lines:
Alfred Schutz was born in Vienna on April 13, 1899. His father died
before his birth, and his mother married the brother of her first husband,
Otto Schutz. This man was a bank executive who secured a good
middle-class existence for his family; a quiet person, he did not exert
much influence on his stepson. By contrast, Schutz's mother was
energetic, strong-willed, and protective. She played a decisive role in
guiding her son's development
Richard Ellman (1959, p. vii) describes the origins of his justly famous biography of
James Joyce:
Twelve years ago in Dublin Mrs. W. B. Yeats showed me an
unpublished preface in which Yeats described his first meeting with
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James Joyce. My book had its origins at that time, although I did not
work on it steadily until 1952.
Ellman's text (1959, p. 1) begins:
We are still learning to be James Joyce's contemporaries, to
understand our interpreter. This book enters Joyce's life to reflect his
complex incessant joining of event and composition.
[p. 17 ]
In the next chapter, The Family Before Joyce, Ellman (1959, p. 9) states:
Stephen Dedalus [the hero of Joyce's The Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man), said the family was a net which he would fly past, but
James Joyce chose rather to entangle himself and his works in it. His
relations appear in his books under thin disguises.
Quentin Bell (1972, p. 1), begins his biography of his aunt, Virginia Woolf, by locating
her within her family history:
Virginia Woolf was a Miss Stephen. The Stephens emerge from
obscurity in the middle of the eighteenth century. They were farmers,
merchants, and receivers of contraband goods in Aberdeenshire As
soon as she was able to consider such things Virginia believed that she
was heiress to two very different and in fact opposed traditions (p. 18).
Situating the Method

Several critical points concerning the autobiographical and biographical method
may be drawn from these extended excerpts. Autobiographies and biographies are
conventionalized, narrative expressions of life experiences. These conventions,
which structure how lives are told and written about, involve the following problematic
presuppositions, and taken-for-granted assumptions: (1) the existence of others, (2)
the influence and importance of gender and class, (3) family beginnings, (4) starting
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points, (5) known and knowing authors and observers, (6) objective life markers,
(7) real persons with real lives, (8) turning-point experiences, (9) truthful statements
distinguished from fictions.
These conventions serve to define the biographical method as a distinct approach to
the study of human experience. They are the methods by which the real appearances
of real people are created. They are Western literary conventions and have been
present since the invention of the biographical form. Some are more central than
others although they all appear to be universal, while they change and take different
form depending on the writer, the place of writing, and the historical moment. They
shape how lives are told. In so doing, they create the subject matter of the biographical
approach. They were each present in the biographical and autobiographical excerpts
just presented. I will treat each in turn.
[p. 18 ]
The Other: Biographical texts are always written with an other in mind. This other
may be God, as with Augustine; other women (Woolf and Steedman); or an intellectual
or status community of abstract and specific people (Ellman, Wagner, Sartre, Cheever,
Bell, Stanley). The presence of an other in autobiographical and biographical texts
means that they are always written with at least a double perspective in mind: the
author's and the other's. The eye of the other directs the eye of the writer (Elbaz, 1987,
p. 14).
Gender and Class: These texts are gendered, class productions, reflecting the biases
and values of patriarchy and the middle class. They are ideological statements, often
representing and defending the class or gender position of the writer. But more is at
issue. Until recently, women did not write autobiographies. Their lives were not deemed
important enough to have biographies written about them (Steedman, 1987, p. 9). For
example, William Mathew's standard bibliography of British spiritual autobiographies
written during the nineteenth century lists twenty-two written by men and five by women
(Peterson, 1986, pp. 120121). Of the twenty-five individuals in Plummer's (1983, p. 15)
cast of social science subjects from whom life stories were gathered, four are female
subjects, an additional three are about males who were female hermaphrodites.
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Family Beginnings: These productions are grounded in family, family history, the
biographies and the presences and absences of mothers and fathers. It is as if every
author of an autobiography or biography must start with family, finding there the zero
point of origin for the life in question. Elbaz (1987, p. 70) argues that, by the eighteenth
century, this concept of zero point had extended from the realm of the individual
self to that of the social whole. Davis (1986, pp. 5354) suggests that, in sixteenthcentury France, the family system played a double function of placing persons within
a patriarchal structure while positioning them within a larger social field. These family
others are seen as having major structuring effects on the life being written about, for
example, Schutz's mother and stepfather or Stanley's wicked stepmother.
Textual Turning Points: By beginning the autobiographical or biographical text with
family, these sources presume that lives have beginnings or starting points. But, on this,
Gertrude Stein (1960, quoted by Elbaz, 1987, p. 13) reminds us:
[p. 19 ]
About six weeks Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you
were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going
to do. I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as
Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this
is it.
This passage appears at the end of Stein's autobiography, titled, The Autobiography
of Alice B. Toklas (1960). Stein is telling the reader that the beginning coincides with
the end and the end with the beginning which is the end for autobiography (like
fiction) is an act of ceaseless renewal: the story is never told finally, exhaustively,
completely (Elbaz, 1987, p. 13). Stein is suggesting that the narrator or writer of
an autobiography is a fiction, just as an autobiography is a fiction. That is, just as
Defoe wrote a fictional autobiography of a fictional character, Robinson Crusoe, Stein
has written a fictional autobiography of herself called, the autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas. Stein is contending that the line between lives and fictions is impossibly and
unnecessarily drawn (see discussion below).
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The autobiographical and biographical genre is structured by the belief that lives have
beginnings in families. Since this belief is part of the genre, virtually all biographical
texts begin with family history. Stein's position challenges this conventional view
concerning beginnings.
Knowing Authors: These texts presume the presence of an author or outside observer
who can record and make sense of the life in question. If the text is autobiographical,
it is assumed that the self of the writer knows his or her life, and hence is in the best
position to write about it. In the biographical text, the same presumption holds, only
now the interpretive work must be done by a diligent, hardworking, attentive scholar, for
example, Ellman's text above.
Objective Markers: The above excerpts suggest that lives have objective and subjective
markers and that these markers reflect key, critical points about the life in question.
They suggest the existence of real persons, whose existence in a real world can
be mapped, charted, and given meaning. The markers of these real lives may be
the values that structure the text (Woolf), a working class mother's wants and desires
(Steedman), the house where one grew up (Cheever), a selfish stepmother (Stanley),
the death of a father (Sartre, Schutz), a writer's works (Joyce). It is assumed that these
markers fit into place and give coherence to the life in question.
[p. 20 ]
Sartre (1971/1981, p. ix), in his discussion of Flaubert's life, makes the following
argument as he describes two pieces of information about Flaubert:
The fragments of information we have are very different in kind;
Flaubert was born in December 1821 that is one kind of information
he writes, much later, to his mistress: Art terrifies me that is
another. The first is an objective, social fact, confirmed by official
documents; the second, objective too refers in its meaning to a
feeling that issues from experience Do we not then risk ending up
with layers of heterogeneous and irreducible meanings? This book
attempts to prove that irreducibility is only apparent, and that each
piece of data set in its place becomes a portion of the whole, which is
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constantly being created, and by the same token reveals its profound
homogeneity with all the other parts that make up the whole.
A life, it is assumed, is cut of whole cloth, and its many pieces, with careful scrutiny,
can be fitted into proper place. But this writing of a life, Sartre suggests, like Stein, is
constantly being created as it is written. Hence the meanings of the pieces change as
new patterns are found.
The Subject in the Text: An Aside

Sartre's position skirts the problem of the subject's reality in the world of the
autobiographical text. Granted Flaubert was born in December 1821, but how does
Sartre get Flaubert's life into his text? This is the problem of language and writing,
for, as Derrida (1981) argues, the principle knowledge of (and about) a subject only
exists in the texts written about them. Sartre proclaims the existence of a real person,
Flaubert. However, as Benveniste (1966) argues, and Derrida (1972/1981, p. 29;
1972, p. 271), develops, the linguistic concept of person or subject in language only
refers to the person making an utterance, as in I am writing this line about persons.
My referentiality in the above line is only given in the pronoun I. My personhood is
not in this line. The pronoun I is a shifter, and its only reference is in the discourse
that surrounds it. This means, as Elbaz (1987, p. 6) argues, that the notion of person
takes meaning only within the parameters of the discursive event. My existence, or
Flaubert's, is primarily, and discursively documented in the words written about or by
them.
[p. 21 ]
But more is involved than just the use of personal pronouns like I. Persons as speaking
subjects (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p. 84) are not just empty signs, created solely by the
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syntactical and semiological structures of language (Ricoeur, 1974, pp. 236266).

Language, for the biographer and autobiographer, is not just an object or a structure
but a mediation through which and by means of which (Ricoeur, 1974, p. 251), writers
and speakers are directed toward biographically meaningful reality. What is at issue
here is how the writing and speaking subject, as the bearer of meaning (Ricoeur,
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1974, p. 246) in his or her texts, appropriates this pronoun I, which is an empty sign,
and posits himself [herself] in expressing himself [herself] (Ricoeur, 1974, p. 256).
The pronoun I is waiting to be used by the autobiographical subject. Indeed, the genre
and the larger political economy where such texts circulate dictates its use, along with
its referent, self (see Elbaz, 1987, p. 153). But, as Benveniste (1966, p. 218) observes,
I signifies the person who is uttering the present instance of the discourse containing
I. Now, while any speaker or writer can use this empty sign, when it is used by the
writer of a biographical or autobiographical text, its use signifies this person making this
utterance, this claim, or this statement. Behind the pronoun stands a named person
a person with a biography. When, as a writer and a speaker, this person appropriates
these words and this pronoun (I, you, he, she, me), he or she brings the full weight of
his or her personal biography to bear upon the utterance or statement in question (see
Schutz and Luckmann, 1973, p. 114). The personal pronoun thus signifies this person
making this utterance. It becomes a historical claim.
This is what autobiographies and biographies are all about: writers making biographical
claims about their ability to make biographical and autobiographical statements about
themselves and others. In this way, the personal pronouns take on semantic and not
just syntactic and semiological meanings (Ricoeur, 1974, p. 256). The self, and its
signifies (I, etc.) thus take on a double existence in the biographical text. First, they
point inward to the text itself, where they are arranged within a system of narrative
biographical discourse. Second, they point outward to this life that has been led by
this writer or this subject. Untangling this mediation and interaction between these two
points of reference is what the above discussion has been all about.
The Real Person: When a biographer purports to be giving the real objective details
of a real person's life, he or she is, in fact, only [p. 22 ] creating that subject in the
text that is written. To send readers back to a real person is to send them back to yet
another version of the fiction that is in the text. There is no real person behind the text,
except as he or she exists in another system of discourse. But the central postulate of
the biographical method (and of this book) is that there is a real person out there
who has lived a life, and this life can be written about. This real person was born, has
perhaps died, has left his or her mark on other people, and has probably deeply felt
the human emotions of shame, love, hate, guilt, anger, despair, and caring for others.
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This feeling, thinking, living, breathing person, is the real subject of the biographical
method.
The languages of autobiographical and biographical texts, then, cannot be taken as
mere windows into the real world of real interacting subjects. These languages
are only devices, tools, or bricolages for creating texts. The writers who use them are
bricoleurs, or persons who use the means at hand to create texts which look like
autobiographies or biographies (Derrida, 1972, p. 255).
Turning Points: Barely hinted at in the above excerpts, is the belief that a life is shaped
by key, turning-point moments. These moments leave permanent marks. Again the
author draws an example from Sartre, only now from his biography of Jean Genet
(1952/1963, p. 1):
An accident riveted him to a childhood memory, and this memory
became sacred. In his early childhood, a liturgical drama was
performed, a drama of which he was the officiant [one who officiates]:
he knew paradise and lost it, he was a child and driven from his
childhood. No doubt this break is not easy to localize. It shifts back
and forth, at the dictates of his moods and myths, between the ages of
ten and fifteen. But that is unimportant. What matters is that it exists and
that he believes in it. His life is divided into two heterogeneous parts:
before and after the sacred drama.
The notion that lives are turned around by significant events, what I call epiphanies,
is deeply entrenched in Western thought. At least since Augustine, the idea of
transformation has been a central part of the autobiographical and biographical
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form. This means that biographical texts will typically be structured by the significant,
turning-point moments in a subject's life. These moments may be as insignificant as
Augustine's stealing pears from a pear tree and feeling guilt about the theft (Freccero,
1986, p. 23), or as profoundly moving as the scene in Genet's life described above by
Sartre.
[p. 23 ]
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Truth: The above texts suggest that lives have objective, factually correct, truth-like,
documentary features. A person was born on such a date, died on this date, and, in
between these dates, lived an important life. Cheever challenges this point, reminding
the reader that facts can be altered by a storyteller in order to make them interesting
and more significant. It is necessary, however, to dispense with Cheever's distinction.
As suggested above, to argue for a factually correct picture of a real person is to
ignore how persons are created in texts and other systems of discourse.
Standards of Autobiographical Truth

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Various standards of truth in autobiographies have been proposed. These include

sincerity, subjective truth, historical truth, and fictional truth. The sincere autobiographer
is assumed to be willing to tell the subjective truths about his or her life. A historically
truthful statement would be one that accords with existing empirical data on an event
or experience. An aesthetic truth is evidenced when the autobiography is an aesthetic
success (Kohli, 1981, p. 70). Presumably such a work conforms to the canons of
the autobiographical genre and reports the writer's life as the public wants to hear it
reported. A fictional truth occurs when it is argued that the real truth is to be contained
in pure fiction (Kohli, 1981, p. 73).
More is at issue, however, than just different types of truth. The problem involves facts,
facticities, and fiction. Facts refer to events that are believed to have occurred or will
occur, i.e. the date today is July 27, 1988. Facticities describe how those facts were
lived and experienced by interacting individuals (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p. 119; Husserl,
1913/1962, pp. 184 and 410). Fiction is a narrative (story, account) which deals with
real or imagined facts and facticities. Truth, in the present context, refers to statements
that are in agreement with facts and facticities as they are known and commonly
understood within a community of minds (Peirce, 1959, Volume 8, p. 18; 1958, p. 74).
Reality consists of the objects, qualities or events to which true ideas are directed
(Peirce, 1958, p. 74). There are, then, true and false fictions; that is, fictions that are
in accord with facts and facticities as they are known or have been experienced, and
fictions that distort or misrepresent these understandings. A truthful fiction (narrative)
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is faithful to facticities and facts. It creates verisimilitude, or what are for the reader
believable experiences.
[p. 24 ]
Shapiro (1968, p. 425), Pascal (1960, p. 19), and Renza (1977, p. 26) argue, and
Cheever would agree that the autobiography is an imaginative organization of
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experience that imposes a distortion of truth. Autobiographical statements are, then,

viewed as a mixture of fiction and nonfiction, for each text contains certain unique truths
or verisimilitudes about life and particular lived experiences.
Elbaz (1987, p. 11) quotes Renza (1977, p. 26) who claims that autobiographies are
neither fictional or factual:
We might say that autobiography is neither fictive nor non-fictive.
We might view it as a unique, self-defining mode of selfreferential expression that allows, then inhibits, the project of selfpresentification. Thus we might conceive of autobiographical writing
as an endless prelude: a beginning without middle (the realm of fiction),
or without end (the realm of history); a purely fragmentary, incomplete
literary project, unable to be more than an arbitrary document.
Here Renza is making an unnecessary distinction between fiction and nonfiction, for
all writing, as suggested above, is fictional. His other points about the autobiography
warrant discussion. He assumes that there is a real self-referential self that gets
expressed in the writer's text, and this self expresses itself in unique ways. What he
fails to clarify is that the real, self-referential self is only present in a series of discourses
about who a person is or was in the past. As Elbaz (1987, p. 12) observes, The
autobiographer always writes a novel, a fiction, about a third person, this third person
being who he or she was yesterday, last year, or one hour ago. Autobiography and
biography present fictions about thought selves, thought experiences, events and
their meanings. Such works are tormented by the problem of getting this person into
the text, of bringing them alive and making them believable. Fictions, in this sense,
merely arrange and rearrange events that could have or did happen. Realist fiction,
for example, presents its narrative in a way that is made to appear factual, i.e. as
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a linear, chronological sequence of events. Elbaz (1987, p. 1) argues, and I agree,

autobiography is fiction and fiction is autobiography: both are narrative arrangements of
reality (italics added).
arbitrario vs no arvitrario
The autobiographical and biographical forms, like all writing forms, are always
incomplete literary productions. They are never arbitrary, as Renza argues, for no
document is ever arbitrary (Elbaz, 1987, p. 12). These two forms are always a series
of beginnings, which are then [p. 25 ] closed or brought to closure through the use
of a set of narrative devices. These devices, called conclusions or last chapters, allow
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these forms to conform with the cultural myth that lives have endings, and that true,
complete stories about these lives have been or can be told. However, as argued
above, autobiographies and biographies are only fictional statements with varying
degrees of truth about real lives. True stories are stories that are believed in.
The dividing line between fact and fiction thus becomes blurred in the autobiographical
and biographical text, for if an author can make up facts about his or her life, who is to
know what is true and what is false? The point is, however, as Sartre notes, that if an
8
author thinks something existed and believes in its existence, its effects are real. Since
all writing is fictional, made-up out of things that could have happened or did happen,
it is necessary to do away with the distinction between fact and fiction (see additional
discussion below).
Recapitulation
Given the above arguments, it is suggested that the following assumptions and
arguments should structure the use of the biographical method in the human disciplines.
The lived experiences of interacting individuals are the proper subject matter of
sociology. That is, sociologists must learn how to connect and join biographically
meaningful experiences to society-at-hand and to the larger culture- and meaningmaking institutions of the late postmodern period (Mills, 1959; Denzin, 1989a, chap. 1;
Becker, 1986, pp. 1213). The meanings of these experiences are best given by the
persons who experience them. A preoccupation with method, with the validity, reliability,
generalizability, and theoretical relevance of the biographical method (Blumer, 1939
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and 1979; Plummer, 1983; Kohli, 1981 and 1986; Helling, 1988) must be set aside
in favor of a concern for meaning and interpretation (Denzin, 1986a, 1986b, 1986c,
1984b). Students of the biographical method must learn how to use the strategies
and techniques of literary interpretation and criticism (Dolby-Stahl, 1985). They must
bring their use of the method in line with recent structuralist and poststructuralist
developments in critical theory (Derrida, 1967/1973; 1967/1978; 1972/1981; Frank,
1985; Jameson, 19751976; Denzin, 1989a, 1989b, 1989c) concerning the reading and
writing of social texts. This will involve a concern with hermeneutics (Gadamer, 1975);
semiotics (Barthes, 1957/1972; Manning, 1987); feminist theory (Balsamo, 1988);
cultural studies [p. 26 ] and Marxism (Hall, 1980, 1987); postmodern social theory
(Denzin, 1986a), and deconstructionism (Derrida, 1972/1981).
Lives and the biographical methods that construct them are literary productions.
Lives are arbitrary constructions, constrained by the cultural writing practices of the
time. These cultural practices lead to the inventions and influences of gendered,
knowing others who can locate subjects within familied social spaces where lives have
beginnings, turning points, and clearly defined endings. Such texts create real persons
about whom truthful statements are presumably made. In fact, as argued above, these
texts are narrative fictions, cut from the same kinds of cloth as the lives they tell about.
When a writer writes a biography, he or she writes him- or herself into the life of the
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subject written about. When the reader reads a biographical text, that text is read
through the life of the reader. Hence, writers and readers conspire to create the lives
they write and read about. Along the way, the produced text is cluttered by the traces of
the life of the real person being written about (Roth, 1988; Lesser, 1988).
These assumptions or positions turn on and are structured by the problem of how to
locate and interpret the subject in biographical materials. This problem organizes the
author's arguments throughout the remainder of this book. In the next chapter I seek
to clarify a number of concepts which surround this method, its use, and its history in
sociology and literature (Bertaux, 1981, pp. 78; Bertaux and Kohli, 1984; Helling, 1988;
Plummer, 1983, chapter 2; Titon, 1980; Denzin, 1989b, chapter 8; Elbaz, 1987, chapter
1).
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NOTES
1. Where one opens up this history is somewhat arbitrary. See Schutz, 1932/1967, p.
S for a review; also Simmel, 1909/1950. Clearly, W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki's
multi-volumned work, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (19181921) is part
of this early concern for the subject and his or her subjective life experiences (Wiley,
1986). William James (1890) and the other American pragmatists Dewey, Peirce and
Mead, also participated in this early focus on the individual and his or her presence in
the world.
2. The autobiography, the root form of the biography, has been a central preoccupation
of Western literature and the discourse of modernism at least since Augustine (A.D.
354430) wrote his Confessions. See Elbaz, 1987, pp. vii and 18; but also see Misch,
1951, volume 1, chapter 2 for a discussion of the earlier origins of the autobiography as
a literary form or genre in the ancient civilizations of the Middle East. The metaphysics
of presence, coupled with the concept of a self who can write its history, has been
continuous throughout the ages (Elbaz, 1987, p. vii; also Foucault, 1980; Derrida,
1967/1973). On [p. 27 ] hermeneutics, see Heidegger, 1962 and Gadamer, 1975.
Also see Plummer, 1983, chapter 2 for a review of the history of this method in
sociology.
3. I am indebted to Norbert Wiley for calling this Ricoeur manuscript to my attention.
4. See Peterson, 1986, pp. 9 and 121. Peterson also notes that this concept is present
in the Old Testament.
5. See Kohli, 1981, pp. 6972 for a review.
6. However, see Elbaz, 1987, pp. 913.
7. See Elbaz, 1987, p. 13 and the discussion of obituaries in chapter 4.
8. See also Thomas and Thomas, 1928, pp. 571572.
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9. Lesser (1988) notes, for example, that British and American autobiographers differ
in their writing style. English writers are intimate and discreet and refer in their texts to
a single author (I) and a single reader (you), while American writers anguish over who
the audience is and typically speak of themselves in the third, not the first, person. She
offers a cultural and class explanation of these differences, contending that the typical
English autobiography reads as if it were written by a man who has gone to Eton or
Oxbridge (Lesser, 1988, p. 26).
10.4135/9781412984584.n1
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Interpretive Biography

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Interpretive Biography

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Interpretive Biography

ASSUMPTIONS OF THE METHOD

Contributors: Norman K. Denzin

SAGE Research Methods

ASSUMPTIONS OF THE METHOD

The Subject and the Biographical Method

interpretive biographical variants, including hermeneutics.