Interpretive biography and questions

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Interpretive biography and questions: Interpretive Biography provides an

Buy the book icon link. More information Less information. Summary Contents Like all writing, biographies are interpretive. Assumptions of the Method. A Clarification of Terms. Interpretive Guidelines. Selves, Stories, and Experiences. Bringing in elements of postmodernism and interpretive social science, he reexamines the biographical and autobiographical genres.

Interpretive biography and questions: Interpretive biography is a

In addition, the book outlines a new way in which biographies should be conceptualized and shaped. Biographies and autobiographies must be organized and interpreted. In this chapter, I review several guidelines that have been proposed for the ordering and interpreting of life history, life story, autobiographical, and biographical materials.

Traditionally, users of the objective approaches have judged their efforts in terms of the norms of validity, reliability, truth, falsity, bias, data, hypotheses, theory, case representativeness, and generalizability Helling,pp. Have you created a personal profile? In writing a life story, I create the conditions for rediscovering the meanings of a past sequence of events Ulmer, In so doing, I create new ways of performing and experiencing the past.

In bringing the past into the autobiographical present, I insert myself into the past and create the conditions for rewriting and hence reexperiencing it. Thus are revealed hidden features of the present as well as of the past Ulmer, I want to invent a new version of the past, a new history. This is what interpretive biography does. Here is an example, an excerpt from an ongoing project Denzin, When I was little, in the s, living in south central Iowa, my grandmother would tell stories about Indians.

She loved to tell the story about the day a tall Indian brave, with braided hair, came to her mother's kitchen door and asked for some bread to eat. This happened when grandma was a little girl, probably around This Indian was so polite and handsome. Mother said his wife and children stood right behind him in a straight row. The Indian said his name was Mr.

This article serves as a brief on answering such questions.

Interpretive biography and questions: Like all writing, biographies

The biographical turn, as we find convenient to call the renewed interest in biography and biographic approaches that has been taking place over the last decades, converging from several disciplines of the humanities, appears like a paradigmatic debate of sorts, that both calls for a new definition of biography in the larger sense of the term, and generates a theoretical demand.

This article positions biographical studies within the perimeter of life-writing considered as an emerging crossroads discipline in the humanities. It argues that the very reappraisal of the central concept of the subject operated by the philosophy of deconstruction and analytic philosophy has entailed the emergence of life-writing, and created the intellectual need to theorize biography in this la The development of biography often has been associated with shifts in historiography and literature.

Theoretical publications on the biographical enterprise however offer opportunities to chart changes in the genre since the midnineteenth century as driven by developments in journalism. The influence of journalistic methods on biography has largely been underestimated until now. Another key area for exploration is the tension between fictionalised biography and the genre as approached by historians.

While an artificial distinction is sometimes posited between those whose primary focus is literary on the one hand, and scholarly writers on the other, writing well is just as important to non-fiction writers as it is to novelists.