The Self in the Social: Making Senses of the Masses through Biography

How do we argue our subjects are worth the individuation biographical analysis records, awards, and enchants?  The history of biography is inextricable with the history of social diagnosis.  During the early-twentieth century genesis of modern biography, works like Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives (1909), Sigmund Freud’s Leonardo Da Vinci: A Memory of His Childhood (1910), Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918), and Gamaliel Bradford’s “American Portraits” exalted significance of singularity within a broader social complexity. Whereas the nineteenth century has been identified as the era of the “unvarnished truth” plied in individual autobiography, memoir, and published journals, the late-nineteenth century saw the fulmination of biography as a conscientious construction of representative persons.  Scholars of biography have interpreted the chronological correlation between turn-of-the-century modernist movements and the quickened ascendancy of biography as a literary symptom of nineteenth-century modernization, including the interconnected experiences of rampant immigration, urbanization, and industrialization the multiplied the social public into diffuse communities seemingly uncontainable by any single icon.  Biography constructed a purposive self within this confused swirl.  Whereas autobiography might be understood as a discourse of anxiety, Jürgen Schlaeger describes biography as “a discourse of usurpation” which perpetually accommodates  “new models of man, new theories of the inner self, into a personality-oriented cultural mainstream.” The success of biography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was in part, then, a metaphorical expression of modern consolidation and incorporation, a fusing of the self into discernible types within the maelstrom of modernity.  This presentation seeks to theorize the meaning of the masses against which the singular self might be elected.