Pathography
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The term pathography (from pathos and -graphy) was coined in the 1850s to denote a biography that focuses on faults, unlucky circumstances, failures, and other negative aspects of the person's life, perhaps now best-known as psychobiography.
An article on Shakespeare's sonnets in the Westminster Review of 1857 noted:
- "Here it was that Augustus Schlegel erred when he thought that the sonnets would afford material for a fresh biography of Shakspeare. They do not ... They are not so much biography, as, if we may be allowed to coin a word, pathography.".
The term was used by Freud in his essay on Da Vinci
- "It would be futile to blind ourselves to the fact that readers today find all pathography unpalatable."
In a review of a biography of Jean Stafford Joyce Carol Oates revived the word calling some warts-and-all biographers pathographers saying that
²:"pathography typically focuses upon a far smaller canvas, sets its standards much lower. Its motifs are dysfunction and disaster, illnesses and pratfalls, failed marriages and failed careers, alcoholism and breakdowns and outrageous conduct."
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