A Poetic Process in Contemporary Literary Biography

This paper analyzes, by way of a personal recollection of my own trajectory as a researcher of literary biography, the contrast between the canonical form of biography and its poetical underpinnings, and an alternative vein, which seems to me to somehow collapse process and product. Examining certain autobiographical aspects of the endeavor thus makes the biographer and the archive behind every finished biography more visible. I describe what seems to me to be a process similar to what Lawrence Venuti has described as the translator's work, and discuss the invisibilization of both the biographer and the research process that made the biography possible. I also present some cases that do not follow this pattern and that seem to be referents for a small tradition in contemporary biographical writing, as well as fruitful venues for future adventures in both the content and the form of literary biographies.