Biografiese geskiedskrywing: ’n Rekenskap

Abstract

In this article – held as a lecture in September 2004 at the bi-annual congress of the Afrikaanse Letterkunde-Vereniging at Potchefstroom – the author gives a brief historical and theoretical orientation of the “business” of literary biography. He points out that the “appetite for gossip” in the past led to the view of the biographer as a sort of superior journalist in search of sensation, ignored both by social historians with larger concerns and literary critics who concentrated on the “printed page”, with no interest in the author behind the text. With the emergence of a new kind of life-history, based on the scrutiny of documents and an empirical method, the status of biography changed. For reasons deeply hidden in the social and cultural history of our time, the reading public became more interested in the lives of authors, probably because the inner life of a struggling individual was as fascinating as that of a general on the battlefield. After a survey of the small number of literary biographies in Afrikaans, the author outlines briefly why he writes biographies and why he decided on the writers who attracted him: strong creative forces, men of intellectual abilities and especially of unimpeachable integrity.