Transforming Biography: From the Claim of Objectivity to Intersubjective Plurality

Abstract

The future of biography can be explored by looking at the itinerary of historian Robert Rosenstone, who has moved from writing an exemplary and classical work - Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (1975) - to creating an innovative, multi voiced one - Mirror in the Shrine (1988) - in which he freely utilizes his own subjectivity to tell the story of lives. Here Rosenstone both accepts the challenge of postmodernism and manages to express the plurality and multiplicity of his subjects without falling into fragmentation or unhinging his competencies as historian. His work, which should inspire other narrative experiments, also suggests that to create a suitable biography for our times, we historians need to admit the intersubjectivity of our own scholarly activity.