Biography of the Writer’s Persona and Oeuvre as an Anthropological Resource: The Case of Albanian Writers Milosh Gjergj Nikolla (Migjeni) and Ernest Koliqi
Keywords:
literary anthropology, biography in anthropology, Albanian literature, Ernest Koliqi, MigjeniAbstract
Drawing on an examination of narratives about the lives and work of two Albanian writers, Millosh Gjergj Nikolla-Migjeni and Ernest Koliqi, the paper analyzes biography as an ethnographic source. Biographical data on Migjeni and Koliqi are presented within the context of chronotopic identification of their legacy, as well as within the framework of perception and reception of their personalities. Attention is paid to the process of biographical recognition of these two authors as writers who speak “about us” (that is, about their own community), through which they came to be seen as voices of collective experience – albeit markedly different, if not opposed, to one another. The paper thus demonstrates how the narrativization of private circumstances and the ideological context of the authors’ public engagement establishes an interpretative framework for analyzing their lives and works. It concludes that biography can serve as an important resource for the anthropological valorization of an author’s overall activity and for examining the ways in which cultural meanings of the present are questioned, redefined, and produced in relation to the past.
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