The biography as a literary genre

Biography, has the gift of the trial, the narrative background of the novel, the flow of the drama and the lyrical grace of the best written poetry. With these elements, a biography becomes a literary highlight fact, at the same time that highlighted is the figure that she is exalted. It is not enough to accumulate data and be as accurate as the price of potatoes, so accurate as a balance that gives the faithful in kilograms of the goods on offer. A biography should not be a factual account, without grace and brains of the application - day of the noted. Even should not become a daily, or become entangled in descriptive excess and stop in a strict assessment of socio-political or socio-cultural environment in which the personality unfolds, nor pass to psychoanalyze her, or spread, and pages on the erotic events circumstantial of someone that was not distinguished but as hero or poet, which is another way of being hero in the contemporary world. Sometimes they are u000aNice those biographies of frivolous Court which stop at many wives or mistresses were Napoleón, Bolívar, José Martí, or more recently Fidel Castro.

There are alleged biographies who want to take advantage of the curiosity, to the "secret", about what living personality cared with more zeal: privacy. The biographer who goes in search of the scandal, wants money to your bank account. The art of biografiar, as all art, goes far beyond any espúreo attempt, all narration of Vertigo. Are you can exploit the scandal in our societies used to all sorts of affairs, especially political, corruption or sex, the magazines "of the heart" ("that which has reasons which reason knows no"), and the journalistic entanglements that make cut breathing every morning when we read in the yellow press the murders of the day. But you can not deceive ourselves with fairy tales without fairies, witches of shoddy, u000ain the background aren't really biographies, but denotaciones against someone, the parties concerned in favour of third parties or simple strings of gossip, gossip, entanglements and intrascendencias that can not steal space to the true work of art of the word that is a legitimate biography.

Definitions
what it is, a biography? The definitions of dictionaries and encyclopedias are short if they don't offer the relief the testimonial value, and the pair stylistic, artistic, the reference work offers. A good biography should live as long as the social memory of his noted. Sometimes she is recovery of historical justice, necessary to rescue someone who while fierce and disgregante had been subjected to an unfair oblivion. And the good biography does not fear the subjectivity, because all human life is, Amen to a series of objective events, a sequence of subjectivities, as they said in a subtly different way u000aJosé Ortega y Gasset and Miguel de Unamuno, are: which we believe to be, who believe that we are and who we really are. A great biography should be grouped into a single description of personality, these three basic beings we tend to be in life. And not by weaving with psychological threads is achieved in a single work reach the last of an existence meaning. However, perhaps this is the greater purpose of all serious, credible biography and with the right to survival.

Some poets have said that they are not accountable, but that his work is his true and legitimate life. José Lezama Lima has only personal biography beyond her own writing, of his books, his "static errancia", moving information and from her, subjectively working the objectivity of historical data, the master phrase or work teacher. I couldn't very well say Lezama Lima "I am not more than my works". And in any case, it is enough with Paradiso for u000aknow him as an artist. However, the expression could be ambiguous: what works is spoken? Especially since Lezama was a Catholic man and it would have read that passage novotestamentario that Christ said that "by their works you will know them".

Variants of writing
the term biography, definitely, it serves to point out a gender, but inside it there are as many variants of writing, along the lines of how the case with poetry. You must distinguish between the interest historical, political, critical study of literary or artistic mode of trial, of scientific Court extensively documented, of extreme subjectivity fictionalization of a moment of life, of the milestones which pointed out that human existence, all the details from birth to death, which emphasize more in the works that in the life of the noted facts, those who stop just to witness the event, the circumstance, the time or other u000aavatars and the noted it is only a pretext for writing, that they are based or structured in the form of newspapers or of sequences of letters (epistolary biography), which only attest that someone has existed and end up being a life story, those that basically are memoirs or autobiographies with various approaches, because autobiography, as already we scored at the beginningis a particular generic form, tends to be very common and her writes the individual concerned, her dictates or offers basic data in the manner of co-author, when not let her write another completely and the noted then attends the role of censor, reviewer, or offer its veto or his go-ahead.

A biography as such uses all potential sources: stories of life, testimonies, autobiographies, memoirs, diaries, letters, newsworthy stories... and will prove to be a text of comprehensive Court who aspires to be a reflection of the noted, either on his life or u000athe most important temporary segments from it. The equidistance between objectivity and subjectivity can break in favour of the second, when the biography is trying to adopt the teno in a novel. Any manela, entire biography is a version, a reading of life, for which each professional should assemble many and very different and sometimes contradictory biographies.

Values
If Harold Bloom has told us "the bad reading", referring to literary criticism, perhaps entire biography is that: a bad read, an interpretation of a life, to deviate inevitably from strictly factural, to assess or narrating with emphasis, to exalt or denostar, is diverting attention or is distorted in some way the most legitimate reality of biografiada personalityYou can become a saga idealized for her good or its worse. A biography, by very reliable as it is, does not escape the fate of the subjectivity of the biographer, to the u000ahistoric stage in which to interpret the yesterday. The elegiac hue which involves a work of this nature, contributes to the subjectivity that then has to be strengthened in the hands of the recipient, who in turn, will make a poor reading of a bad reading.

Is that the final destination of all biography? Its own value of literaturidad, the lexical gala that biographer and his claw of writer can contribute to the subjectivisation. A biography is ultimately also a literary work, and has to suffer the avatez own generic divisions and writing as an exercise in art of the word

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BIOGRAFIAR novels STEFAN ZWEIG
Biografiar is telling, and somehow also is romanticize, and I've done, there are beautiful and valuable biography reconstructs as Stefan Zweig on Fouché, decapitated Queen Marie Antoinette, or Magellan. However, the biography differs from novel, any fiction, in which a biography should u000aappeal to the reality - of a life lived objectively, and therefore the fact biografiar us faces an act of "nonfiction" writing. It must differ, for example, the "Aurelia", Nerval, the "Werther", Goethe, or the "Demian" of Hermann Hesse, by only closer to fiction that disputarían semibiográficos values. A biography would not be that we can understand by "novel without fiction" as one "in cold blood" by Truman Capote, so different from any biography of santo, politician, poet, artist or athlete in his highly successful vital moments.

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