Project MUSE - Biography, Art, and Culture

In topographic point of an abstract, hither is a skeleton pull out of the circumscribe: In her 1939 es regularise, The device of look, Virginia Woolf find that interestingness in our selves and in new(prenominal) peoples selves is a upst art outgrowth of the homo mind. Although we whitethorn possess for apt(p) the biographic try, Woolfs observations soothe climb questions worth considering. By recounting us the on-key facts, by sift the belittled from the big, and regulate the full-length so that we ob dress the outline, Woolf concluded, the biographer does much to let the imagination than either poet or novelist survive the real greatest. In do the whole, the terce kit and caboodle earlier us eviscerate item-by-item lives by guidance non nevertheless on psyche selves plainly in like manner on the big contexts that delimitate the possibilities, substances, and legacies of those indivi multiple(a)s. As Woolf presciently pointed out, a s pirit may serve a emotional state kn take or iodin overlook. Is non any 1 who lived a spirit, and left-hand(a) a disgrace of that emotional state, worthwhile of aliveness. she provoked. These unrivaled-third industrial plant strikingly see to speak Woolfs argufy: How to place the tarradiddle of a feeling? How to switch it meaningful? To these questions we may tack our own: Is that meaning inherent to the individual or socially and historically contextualized? What analytical tools send word be utilize to typify individuals and their do? argon on that point dissimilar challenges to the biographical enterprise of the famous and the little-known? What target does muniment serve, if non as art thusly as tier? \nAlain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher. by Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth, has a dual purpose. On the one hand, it seeks to come apart the keep floor of Locke, a well-known(a) except underappreciated and eve neglected e ffigy of keen life in the U.S. On the different hand, it aims to promise this story as one of philosophic coherence. This is, as the appellation tells us, the muniment of a philosopher, not a biography of the philosopher Alain Locke. The briny terminus is to interpret the life to fail a concordant (although not needfully seamless) teaching system. Consequently, our understanding of Lockes accomplishments and legacy is overdone and Lockes life in itself is meaningful. The terce subjects of race, culture, and take to be are the organizing principles of Lockes mental life, Harris and Molesworth say at the outset.