Background Information
It is important to provide my students with a brief background about biography, its origins, and why we will be using it in class.
Francis Bacon, widely known throughout high school science classes as the father of The Scientific Method, was a Renaissance philosopher of sorts. Most of his works revolved around the idea of investigating all things natural. He often chronicled his own thoughts about rhetorical methods in which to know the world. In Bacon's second book, of Advancement of Learning, he argues that if more people were open to the world around them, they would be more enlightened by the resource of history. He believed that "narrative is a meter imitation of History" and that "a visible History, for it sets out the image of things as if they were present, and History, as if they were passed." 4 Bacon reminds us that historical context plays a part in biography in that it reveals its flaws and ideological agendas. As outlined in Lee's book, Bacon breaks the concept of history into three main segments: chronicles of age, lives, narrations. If we combine historical context, primary source documents, and biographies, he believes that we are creating a whole history and that is what this unit is exactly set out to do.
Biography usually begins with the chronological sequencing of the subject's life between birth and death. Using chronology implies order and growth developing from that organization. That is what creates a narrative life. This kind of standard format of biography can be broken down into three main sections: birth, rising action, death. Birth can be set up to offer insights about the exposition of a subject's life — the part of the work that introduces the characters, setting, and basic situation of the subject's life. Rising action can be seen much like the rising action in a traditional narrative — the part of the story that occurs when conflict is introduced, adding complications and often adding to a reader's interest. Rising action also offers the idea that characters are formed by not only their positive experience, but also their negative ones. Last, chronology ends with death, which can either tie up a biography into a nice package or leave us with endless questions.
Biography is a contested political form even in asking the simple question, what is its purpose? Is it to make sense of life? To entertain? To connect to readers? To provide knowledge and expertise? Biography, by its nature, is a rich text. In the end it is an abstract life based on chronological facts. It is the biographer's responsibility to provide fair interpretations of objectivity. The issue of bias and disclosure challenges texts and a biographer's interpretation of them. Students will work as the chief biographer in Langston Hughes's life.
Why Langston Hughes? Obviously, Hughes has a great body of work that ranges in many different genres of writing. More so, Hughes plays an interesting role as a cultural icon for my students. By the time I have them as Seniors they have already have some access to his work via the Social Science units on the Harlem Renaissance. Additionally, one of this main themes, identity, is one that many high school students can identify with. His life is contextually and historically unique and it acts as a superb text.
The History of Biography
Hermione Lee and Nigel Hamilton are historians of biography and its uses and limitations. While Hamilton has takes a global view of biography, I prefer Lee's focus of on the English biography. 5 I will use American authors because that is where my strength lies. While Lee's book is primarily about English biography, her work is of use to me since English biography has been much part of the literary tradition of that culture.
Since the content of this class is geared to be a college level English class, I plan on lecturing on the history of biography. Some of the key points I plan on covering are ur-biographies, hagiography, the skepticism of the Renaissance, and Western biography as a means to explain the history of biography. For purposes of this class, I want my students to understand that biography is the story of someone's life that is factually based and told by someone else. 6
Biography also poses some other questions. The idea that biography is fact based can be controversial. Facts are interpretative and at times speculative. When a story is told by someone else it establishes a different perspective. Biographies therefore need to be multilayered with adequate support. Nevertheless that does not mean that biographies are still without flaws.
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