LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 11 : 11 November 2011
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.

HOME PAGE

BOOKS FOR YOU TO READ AND DOWNLOAD FREE!

REFERENCE MATERIAL

BACK ISSUES

  • E-mail your articles and book-length reports in Microsoft Word to languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.
  • Contributors from South Asia may also e-mail their articles to
    B. Mallikarjun,
    Central Institute of Indian Languages,
    Manasagangotri,
    Mysore 570006, India     mallikarjun@ciil.stpmy.soft.net.

  • PLEASE READ THE GUIDELINES GIVEN IN HOME PAGE IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE LIST OF CONTENTS.

  • Your articles and book-length reports should be written following the APA, MLA, LSA, or IJDL Stylesheet.

  • The Editorial Board has the right to accept, reject, or suggest modifications to the articles submitted for publication, and to make suitable stylistic adjustments. High quality, academic integrity, ethics and morals are expected from the authors and discussants.

Copyright © 2011
M. S. Thirumalai
Custom Search

V. S. Naipaul’s Biography, Autobiography, and Autobiographical Novel

Mujeeb Ali Murshed Qasim, Ph.D. Scholar

I Biography

Facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies; it reveals the writer totally. (V. S. Naipaul Eva Perón, 67)

All biographies like all autobiographies like all narratives tell one story in place of another. (Héléne Cixous, Rootprints, 178)

Direct and indirect references to biographical and autobiographical experiences of V. S. Naipaul are closely reflected in his writings. The present paper will shed light on the definitions and expressions regarding V. S. Naipaul’s autobiographical and biographical writings about him by other authors such as Patrick French, Paul Theroux, and others. I shall also examine how the biographical details based on someone’s study and research may be different from the autobiographical accounts given by the author himself. It is well-known that V. S. Naipaul has not written his autobiography but there are personal accounts at different places in his nonfiction, and travelogues.

It will be very interesting to shed light on the genre of biography, in general, and French’s biography of Naipaul, in particular. To begin with, biography (bios: life, graphein: to write, from the Greek; biographia, from Latin) is the process of recording and searching people’s life and history, which has a beginning, middle, and end, interweaving loose threads into one pattern. Biography needs a researcher to investigate someone else’s life to make sense of it. The first pioneers of biography were the Roman historians Plutarch, Tacitus and Suetonius. The biographer may include relevant material such as “the subject’s own writings (especially diaries and letters), his laundry bills, official archives, memoirs of contemporaries, the memories of living witnesses, personal knowledge, other books on the subject, photographs and paintings” (Cuddon 83).

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Mujeeb Ali Murshed Qasim, Ph.D. Scholar
Department of English
Benares Hindu University
Varanasi 221005
Uttar Pradesh
India
mojeebwd@yahoo.com
Custom Search
  • Click Here to Go to Creative Writing Section

  • Send your articles
    as an attachment
    to your e-mail to
    languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.
  • Please ensure that your name, academic degrees, institutional affiliation and institutional address, and your e-mail address are all given in the first page of your article. Also include a declaration that your article or work submitted for publication in LANGUAGE IN INDIA is an original work by you and that you have duly acknowledged the work or works of others you either cited or used in writing your articles, etc. Remember that by maintaining academic integrity we not only do the right thing but also help the growth, development and recognition of Indian scholarship.