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eBook details

• Title: Ethics and the Biographical Artifact: Doing Biography in the Academy Today (Essay)
• Author : English Studies in Canada
• Release Date : January 01, 2006
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 230 KB

Description

THESE DAYS, BIOGRAPHICAL "ARTIFACTS" in the most mundane sense of the phrase have come sharply, even painfully, into focus for me. This is simply to confess that, at the end of several years of researching and writing my recent biography, The Half-Lives of Pat Lowther, I have yet to confront the truly terrible job of cleaning up my study, which is still cluttered to overflowing with all of those "things"--those physical remnants and records--that we tend to collect in the process of attempting to "reconstruct" a "life." It's a mess that calls to mind Mary Shelley's "filthy workshop of creation." And as I've been tripping over the accordion files, maps, photographs, and so forth that litter my study floor, I've also been grappling with the question of what to do with all of this material now that the book is done: now that the work is, in deed, a "fact"--"a thing done." As opposed to a "fact," "a thing done," artifact of course connotes instead "a thing made"--"an artificial product" of "human art and worksmanship." (1) Interestingly, the OED records the first usage of the word by the British poet Coleridge, who in 1821 deployed it in a long and loving epistolary disquisition on the "ideal qualities and properties" of a good inkstand. Long associated, then, with implements specific to "the art of writing," the term artifact is also useful in relation to the genre of nonfiction--specifically, in relation to the epistemological ambiguity that all nonfiction writing trades in, as the forging of some form of experience into literary truth, or even fact-based prose. (2) It is, clearly, in this epistemological ambiguity--in its exploitation or acknowledgement--that ethics also enters the picture. For if the line between outright artifice and the slippery nature of nonfictional "truth" is any clearer for biographers than it is for, say, memoirists or poets, it nevertheless remains true that the biographical subject, or "I;' too, is fortified on the one hand by "art" and on the other by "fact," just like the letter "i" literally encased in the middle of the word "art-i-fact." (3)

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