Biography

criticism
Dana quintero, Camilo Buitrago, Anderson Luna y Daniela Vásquez
 DEFINITION
• it is a critical approach to literature in which information about an author’s
life and background is used to better understand his works.
• It focuses on links between a work’s content and the writer’s life; often use
the writer's intentions, experiences, motives, or beliefs to interpret his/her
literary texts.
• Real life experience can help shape (either directly or indirectly) an author's
work.
 TAKING INTO ACCOUNT OF
TIP TO MAKE ONE OF COURSE...

THESE WORKS • How to . . .

-Investigate the author’s life, using
biographies, autobiographies, letters, etc.
-Consider how the author’s life helps the
reader understand the text.
-Consider how the author’s beliefs and
values may or may not reflect the values of
his or her time.
 EXAMPLES
Samuel Johnson
Lives of the Poets(1779–81) was the first thorough-going exercise in
biographical criticism, the attempt to relate a writer’s background and life
to his works.
•
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
Was literary critic and one of the major figures of French literary history.
One of Sainte-Beuve's major critical contentions was that in order
understand an artist it was first necessary to understand that artist's
biography.
 FOR ANOTHER HAND…
The following work is a fragment of the
autobiography of the historian José María
Soler García
Fragment of the autobiography of José María Soler García
I was born in Villena, on September 30, 1905, in the street of La Trinidad, No. 2,
third floor, in the same room where today I have installed my private office. And
it's not that we've lived there all our lives, but that my father once had an
insurance agency in Cartagena and we lived there from 1914 to 1917 in Santa
Florentina Street, number 11 - there my sister was born and died Charity-. In 1917
we returned to Villena and lived for a season in several homes: Ferriz Street,
Santiago Street and Caravaca Master - where my sister Bienvenida died; The porch
of this house was occupied by friends to deposit the snacks of the monas on the
days of Easter. Later, aware of the absence of tenants in the street of La Trinidad
No. 2, we returned to occupy the house where I was born. (Continued…)