I tend not to do a lot of biography, in part for exactly the reasons that you mention, that students then tend to do overly biographical readings of the texts. But what I've just realized in reading your blog is that I may be making matters worse. I usually only bring up biography if I think that it does help us to read the text (not necessarily because the fiction mirrors life, but perhaps because the author's experience in a certain area or relationship with another author or the like has influenced the text), but I guess I'm then modelling biographical readings for my students without modelling for them what it means to look at an author's biography and then do a formalist reading of the text. Hmmm, I'll have to think about this pedagogy some more. Thanks for the food for thought.
I usually start a unit on a given author with a bit of biography and where-this-author-sits-in-literary history.
I do it separately from the texts at hand, and usually don't refer too much to specific moments from the text that relate to the author's life. I haven't had too much trouble with students attempting to map biographical info. to their readings (yet).
I've started doing this because I've noticed that my undergraduates rarely know very much about the authors I assign (even the very famous ones), and often forget them, especially if it's a course with many different writers. Biographical information gives them something to hang onto (it's a helpful extended metonymy for the writer and her/his text), and improves their general literary knowledge.
I know that general knowledge and literary history is passé, but I've begun to feel that more advanced readings are limited without it.
Yes, those are some of the reasons why I do talk about biography (also separate from the texts). I can think of very, very few examples when I've referred to the author's life in actually suggesting a reading of a text. (usually in cases when the author has deliberately provided a personal footnote, etc)
So, maybe my question is how can I provide the large-scale literary history/biographical knowledge and yet somehow forbid my students to make lame claims about it in their papers?
I recognise from my own experiences what you're describing, and agree that the causal relationship students tend to set up in their writing between the author's life and what they wrote reflects prevailing mainstream notions about the artist as one who expresses their feelings (and that the success of their art is to be evaluated based on how well they managed to do this). Interestingly, these views tend to be restricted to my local (western) students--the students I have from east Asia have a much more text-based kind of approach to reading and analysis, and little of the trad Romantic view.
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I tend to introduce biography as part of context--maybe giving students a particular author's dates and then asking them what was going on in the world at that time--and from there work in from the general to the particular. But the other thing I try always to do is to problematise the notion of biography immediately I introduce it, saying that "there is a debate around the use of biography as part of interpretation" and so on, doing everything I can to make it difficult for students to jump to conclusions at the same time as sketching some basic details for them.
How well this works will depend on how much of a biographical interface there is between the writer and the work. For example, students handle biography better in the case of Witi Ihimaera, whose biographical context is also a political context (the politicisation of urban Maori during the 1970s) than with Robin Hyde, who wrote many poems arising out of the loss of her first child.
Analytic Philosophy takes writings out of their contexts conpletely & analyzes the validity of the form of the arguments. I hate this approach.
I think that philosophers cannot be understood outside of their historic context (Ex: Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant,Kierkegaard, Nietsche). Every philosopher's burning questions are in response to a driving personal or social interest that required explaining or development. To just relate the primary texts alone without giving some context robs the author of depth & relevance in the case of philosophy - but literature is a different kind of bear...
Just dealing with this now as I'm teaching some Tagore stories. I'm giving some background on the author but also lots of general historical information. Having students do research on historically situated issues (example: purdah) not directly related to the author's biography seems like a step to contextualize without making it seem like biography should be directly "applied" to the text. We'll see how these little research projects on certain topics work out (they are researching and doing brief presentations as groups on the topics, which are fairly directive and take attention off of just the author's life).
I make the students do the biographical spadework. For every piece we read, someone volunteers/is shanghaied to provide "whatever background about the writer, the context, and the allusions might be helpful to the class in understanding the reading." My main purpose is to make them realize that research is an integral aspect of literary study, but it also has the effect of not giving biographical info any sort of professorial imprimatur.
And I've never yet gotten an overly-biographical paper, or indeed anything more biographical than "Kipling was writing during the heyday of the British Empire" prefatory to a discussion of imperialism.
This is a real danger whenever you teach the Bronte sisters, because there's such a legacy of imposing one-to-one biographical interpretations from the life to the text. I mostly do intellectual biography--e.g., briefly explaining Thomas Carlyle's fraught religious background--rather than "and then Carlyle had this really weird marriage" stuff, which eliminates some of the potential trouble. And I no longer allow students to write biographical criticism; even with a lot of coaching on my part, the result always boiled down to "X real-life event offers a transparent interpretation of the text." Biographical criticism sounds so simple, yet in practice it's incredibly difficult to do well.
Everyone's comments have helped me pinpoint part of the issue: it's really about my students' lack of preparation to read poetry. I never get students making biographical claims about the novels I teach (except for some 1st-person contemporary lit in gen ed courses). But faced with a poem, they have such a hard time accepting the play of imagination. And really, I do nothing in class to encourage biographical readings -- but the headnotes in the poetry anthology may be partly responsible.
I wonder if this also has to do with what students are taught is the purpose of poetry at secondary school and earlier? High school teachers should feel free to correct me, but isn't the idea that one writes poetry solely to express one's feelings in language the dominant mode of teaching how to write poetry--and, by implication, how to read it--in compulsory education?
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