Resumen

JOHL, Ronél. Biography in context - what we may learn from controversies: 2) Philip Roth and his biographers. Tydskr. geesteswet. [online]. 2025, vol.65, n.3, pp.947-971. ISSN 2224-7912.  https://doi.org/10.17159/2224-7912/2025/v65n3a11.

As the titles of the two contributions featured here suggest, a particular concern is with what, as researchers, we may learn about the literary biography when we draw the boundaries wider than the generic and consider the biographies within the discursive contexts in which they originate and circulate. What becomes clear even from a fairly limited examination of the epitexts of the first round of the Philip Roth and André P Brink biographies is that the context(s) from which the biographies emerged and within which they circulate have the ability to complicate and undermine any uncritical claims to the truth and objectivity of, about, and in the texts. In the previous contribution (the first of two) I looked at some of the ways in which the context in which the Afrikaans version of Leon de Kock's biography of Brink originated and was published, plus the controversy surrounding the history, could have contributed to the destabilisation of the text in the social imagination and the resulting doubts about the integrity of the biography. In the present contribution, I would like to address in more detail the destabilisation of particular aspects that are often considered "prerequisites" for scientific (literary) biography: "factuality", "objectivity" and "truth". Two biographies of the American writer Philip Roth, which appeared two years after the biography of Brink and were similarly embroiled in controversy, are used as "case studies", with the Brink reference, with a view to possible generalisation.

Palabras clave : truth in biography; objectivity in biography; factuality in biography; case study; authorised biography; unauthorised biography; academic biography; the archive.

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