Untitled - Åbo Akademi

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The modern paradigm emerged from the academic and ideological crisis in humanism
when Darwinism and psychoanalysis gave rise to scepticism about both rationalism and
the Christian view of life. The modern biography is opposed to the ideal of objectivity
and positivistic theory of knowledge. The form of the novel (even journalistic and
essayistic) inspired a wavering between art and science. Intuitive knowledge was
revalued. Psychoanalysis and the complex view of man, nullified earlier moral considerations.
Sundén’s and Stolpe’s biographies belong in part here by reason of their use of
irreverent psychoanalysis and intuition as a biographical method. However, only one of
the biographies can be regarded as a “super biography” in accordance with the modern
paradigm, i.e. the perfect development of biography to a synthesis between, scholarship,
intuitive understanding, credible interpretation and literary execution that is characteristic
of Birger Bergh’s biography.
Three paradigms can be discerned in 20th-century biography: biography as
reconstruction (Leon Edel), biography as construction (Ira Bruce Nadel) and biography
as deconstruction (William H. Epstein). In addition to structural differences it may be
said that Leon Edel is more interested in the psychological and interpretational
processes than Ira Bruce Nadel, who prefers to concentrate on the narrative form of
biography. W.H.Epstein’s view of biography, formulated on the basis of linguistic
theory and closer to Nadel’s approach, constitutes a kind of discourse within discourse.
Epstein takes a post-modern approach proceeding from the illusory in the text of
biography. Leon Edel’s poeticism rests on a belief in referentiality. His theory of
biography combines the psychologically biographical concept of the 1920’s with the
more sceptical, analytical and strictly theoretical perspective of the 1980’s.
Historians’ views of biography
The modernising of Swedish biographical writing came with the “climatic change” that
occurred in the 1940’s-1950’s with the two world wars and the changed, disillusioned
view of mankind, the breakthrough of the natural sciences and psychology together
with the politicisation of society and the formation of new literary theories and
methodologies.
The boom in biography at the end of the 1990’s led to debate among historians.
One critic, the Danish historian Niels Thomsen, speaks of business class and tourist
class. Tourist-class biographers write in order to annoy, amuse, entertain and arouse
curiosity. Elite biographies deepen the reader’s intellectual understanding of changes
and follow the dictates of academic relevance, not any possible societal relevance of
research.
Thomsen has been opposed by Bernhard Eric Jensen and Anne Brigitte Richard,
who went so far as to take upon themselves the task of deciding what a good academic
biography should be like. They value biographies as functional cognitive mediators. The
focus lies on the relationship between the biographer, the subject of the biography and
the readers. The biographer should be familiar with the audience he/she is writing for
and know what he/she wants to achieve with the biography. Even if the entirety and
autonomy of the subject is undermined by sociological, psychological and linguistic
discourses it is necessary for the author to create him/herself, to understand
boundaries, differences, duties and obligations between the ego and the environment.
Our lives are synchronically and diachronically split and we need biography as a means
by which to orient ourselves.