Ways in which the author's biography can limit one's reading.

[Oxygen213]

Hello, everyone. I am working on a paper and have come to a standstill. Does anyone know of ways in which the author's biography can limit one's reading of a literary text?

[loe]

Maybe knowing an author's biography can mislead to interpret his/her writings in a biographical sense.

E. g. Simone de Beauvoir wrote in one of her biographical books that she had the problem that people who read her novels often thought that they read facts about Beauvoir's life.
(Even if she used some of her own experiences, she twisted or changed them in some way - so it's just wrong to read her novels as a biography)

[cafolini]

Unless an author tells you the material is autobiographical, it is a rotund stupidity to read it as such. It implies the a-priori idiotic inference that we must be bound by experience. It is even difficult to accept admitedly autobiographical material as such because life is never what we lived. It is always what we remember. The map is not the territory.
Thus the majority of the Argentineans, for example, pretend sovereignity over the Falklands due to a territorial map they took from the Spaniards during the war of so-called independence. They have to be absolutely insane because they didn't even colonized Patagonia until more than a century later. In their stupid case, they cannot even remember what they claim. It is a good thing the UK gave the islanders citizenship as a result of the Argentine attempted invasion of 1982. Case closed.

[Charles Darnay]

If you are looking for good examples - Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night is a good one. So many people obsessed about the "real people" behind the characters - and this takes away from the novel.

Of course there is Shakespeare: how many analyses have screwed up a play with nonsense about Shakespeare being this person or that person or Italian?

[kev67]

There are two ways knowing about an author's life may limit your understanding of a book. One is if the story contains autobiographical elements and you can see a lot of the author in the main protagonist. You attribute the protagonist's views to those of the author. For example, you assume Jane Eyre's feminist views to be Charlotte Bronte's. You assume scenes of the book are taken from events that really happened to the author, especially if they seem particularly lucid. For example, in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, the lunchtime discussions that the painter-decorators hold sometimes seem so realistic that you assume they are taken from real life, especially knowing that the author, Robert Tressell, worked in that trade. Another example is Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time series. You suspect that much of what happened to Nick Jenkins actually happened to Anthony Powell. Again, some scenes in that book seem so realistic that it is difficult to believe they did not really happen. However, it could have been that those scenes were entirely or significantly fictitious. Another way knowlege of an author's biography could affect your understanding of a book is if you are aware of an author's strong political views. You may assume a character who does not share those views to be an out and out baddie, or another character who does share the author's politics to be incapable of doing wrong. I have not read any of Ang Rand, but I suspect her characters are not very nuanced. I may be prejudiced. Another example could be Fay Wheldon's Big Women, which I have not read but saw on television. Knowing Fay Wheldon to be a feminist, and the story to be largely about a feminist publishing company, I might have assumed that all the feminist characters were right about everything, and all their antagonists were just reactionary, sexist bigots. That would have been limiting because the story was not quite as straightforward as that.