Mr Adrian Chan Hwa Chong Institution 2011 Biographies Mr Adrian Chan Hwa Chong Institution 2011

Biographies Biographies are written stories of a person's life that were written by someone else, while an autobiography is a person's story written by themselves. Biographies make past history more real and easier to understand by telling about real people and actual events. People reading the biography can satisfy their curiosity about well-known individuals and can experience historical events as though they were actually present.

What is a Biography? A good biography presents the facts about the person's life including what the subject did and how they influenced their world. It should describe the person's personality and provide an explanation for why he or she acted in certain ways. Most biographies are interpretive; they not only present the facts but also tell what those facts mean. Biographers make their writings accurate by learning as much as possible about their subjects. They study materials such as diaries, personal letters, and autobiographies. A good biography should be objective and balanced, but those lofty goals are not always achieved. Some biographers present a biased view by selectively presenting only the facts that portray the subject in either a favorable or an unflattering way.

Main Ideas Main Ideas The main forms of biography and alternatives to these, The dynamics and context of biography as a social fact or thing, and a cultural and commercial activity, The taken for granted assumptions made by writers and readers of biography, and what biographies signify, The problematic nature of evidence ñ its identification, accessibility, collection, documentation, assessment and validation, The politics, ethics and (ir)responsibility of writing biography.

Essential Questions 1. What is biography as a social fact or thing? 2. What do we know about it as a cultural and commercial activity? 3. Who are biographers? 4. What are the main forms of biography and what are possible alternative forms? Here, we shall examine i) biography as a literary genre and the sub genres of historical, political, intellectual and celebrity biography; also instant and real-time biography; ii) forms of biography (cradle to grave, person and milieu, life course, life stages, life seasons, generations and cohorts

Essential Questions 5. What is the subject of biography? - personality, individuality, the psychophysical individual, persona, family, neighbourhood, class, nation? 6. Does a biography have to be centred on an individual? How are the sociological determinants of family, upbringing, and milieu handled? 7. What counts as evidence? How may evidence and data (primary, secondary and other) be collected and noted? Here, we shall consider the use and abuse of evidence, and its interpretation and validation.