Biography is, in spite of its intertextual construction, fundamentally reactionary, conservative, perpetually accommodating new models of man, new theories of the inner self, into a personality-oriented mainstream, thus always helping to defuse their subversive potential
Compared with the images of our culture which post-modernism projects, biography is, in spite of its intertextual construction, fundamentally reactionary, conservative, perpetually accommodating new models of man, new theories of the inner self, into a personality-oriented mainstream, thus always helping to defuse their subversive potential.’ (Jürgen Schlaeger, ‘Biography: Cult as Culture’, in John Batchelor, ed., The Art of Literary Biography, 1995.) Discuss.