Az életrajzi térről. Szempontok a biográfiai módszer és a szinoptikus szemlélet történeti alkalmazásához
About Biographical Space: The Application of Biographical and Synoptic Methodologies in Historical Research

Summary/Abstract: Examining the biography of psychologist, educator and politician Ferenc Mérei, this study addresses the question whether the linearity and continuity traditionally associated with biographies constitute an appropriate concept for the study of the complex historicity of a human life. Separating life and biography, the study’s premise is that the disparate data about a life, often carrying no meaning in themselves, are not of the same quality as the facts of a biography (let alone of an autobiography), ordered in hindsight and interpreted along preconceptions. In short, research must differentiate between the experienced and narrated levels of biographies. Through the application of the concept of ‘event of fate’ and a synoptic and parallel examination of documents (in the widest sense of the word), the study probes both these registers of biographic space from the angle of faultlines. Reaching beyond the narrated and ordered life history of a man so skilled in self-interpretation as Mérei, faultlines provide opportunities to explore those incongruent elements that do not fit in the narration, even though they comprise an integral part of the experienced register. Thus, by disrupting the homogeneous, linear and continuous temporality of biographies, this study reclaims the tentative, the aborted, the unexpected, and the unintentional; and by doing so, attempts to restore the complex, non-linear and heterogeneous temporality in historiography.

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