Challenges and Approaches for Foreign Students in Studying a Writer's Biography

This article was previously published in Russian in the journal Pedagogy and Education, available at this link: https://nbpublish.com/ppmag/contents_2024.html.

Introduction

Studying a writer's biography plays a key role in humanities education, reminding us of universal meanings and allowing us to overcome the dichotomy of "writer" and "text." Despite the strict demarcation between the author and the hero, which has become a foundational concept in philological science, one can assert not only the implicit but often also the explicit presence of personality in the studies of formalists and structuralists. The institutional turn toward biography seems symptomatic, indicating a gradual movement from abstract structures to anthropologically significant meanings. In other words, literary theory constantly balances between two poles: the concept of language or discourse as an autonomous system of signs and meanings and speech associated with anthropological and, ultimately, aesthetic activities.

As Yang Rui notes in his research, a unified approach to understanding the phenomenon of biography has not yet been developed, and the methodology of teaching literature still lacks a variety of methods and techniques for studying this material ^[5].

According to A. L. Valevsky, "Biography as a genre of literature is a 'textual representation' in the language of this culture of the phenomenon of personal individuality" ^[6]. A similar approach is proposed by A. I. Reitblat, pointing out a common scientific error: "Often, not only in everyday life, but also in scientific literature, a biography refers to a person's life (at least a number of key events of this life), but the dictionary meaning of this word is 'biography'" ^{[7, p. 178]}. This approach shifts the focus of view from factography to different types of narrative. At the same time, when talking about "textual representation," it is necessary to define the pragmatics and functional significance of a biography. According to Reitblat, biography involves the socialization of a person through their acquaintance with the narrative of the life of a real (existing) person. [...] The biography allows the reader to feel that individual life (and theirs) has a meaning. This meaning is social, in the connection of the individual with society" ^{[7, p. 178]}. In other words, paraphrasing B.V. Dubin's theses, we can assert that biography, along with the standards of interpretation of classical texts of world literature, allows "overcoming the erosion of the normative order" ^{[8, p. 18]}.

The main part

In methodological practice, the study of biography determines the presupposition of reading, influencing the perception of the actual work of art ^[9]. The "canonical" image, which is often fixed at the primary level of studying personality, helps to "standardize" the perception of personality and supports the existence of the so-called "myth of literature" (stable conventional ideas about the activities of writers). However, in the future, this image will interfere with the reader's individual dialogue with the book and must be replaced by an exceptional but not ideal personality image. Here, we see a key discrepancy between the methodology of school education and the study of the writer's biography in the course "Russian literature" for foreign students ^{[10, 11]}. If school students master biographical material concentrically, moving from an extremely accurate factual image to a "sfumato portrait" ^[12], then international students are deprived of this opportunity. Thus, this article aims to describe methods and approaches to study the writer's biography in an audience of foreign readers. However, to achieve this goal, it is necessary to determine the specifics of working with biography in the general methodology of studying literature.

Despite the many successful examples where a conversation about the life of a writer, presented monographically or in the form of a talk-lecture, fascinated students and opened up new facets of interpretation, in some cases, biography classes follow a reasonably stable pattern: students write down the years of life and key dates associated with the creation of works. Thus, with varying degrees of reflection, students and teachers follow a centuries-old tradition, filling out the Curriculum Vitae with wonderful people in their own way ^[12]. "How often is the biography of a writer in school studies likened to a thoroughly filled out questionnaire in which the artist's life is traced from birth to death, and the attention of schoolchildren is equally fixed on the main and secondary? But you can't see the forest behind the trees.… In a multitude of superficially illuminated facts, the artist's unique and multifaceted personality disappears" [13: 5]. These words, which I. E. Kaplan uses to open his book, have, in many way,s not lost their relevance even today.

Based on a modern empirical base: data from school leavers' surveys, undergraduate interns' questionnaires, and the results of "entrance testing" ^[14], several problems can be identified when studying a writer's biography:

• The study of a writer's biography follows a monotonous pattern. The variety of life paths is reduced to a standardized list of dates and events.;
• There are no systemic connections in the study of literary figures (knowledge of literary history is limited by the nominal ability to identify a writer in accordance with a literary trend);
• There is no knowledge of the specifics of literary life; literary life is not consideres a generative environment.;
• The figures of writers exist as if in an airless space. The study of figures lacks consistency, and students do not correlate the texts under consideration with social, historical, and ideological contexts. They do not perceive writers as a social environment.

Without reflection and the participation of analytics in the study of biography, one of the ineffective, although well-established methods of teaching literature iarebeing implemented. In particular, T. Kurdyumova writes: "A dry and concise presentation of the facts is, of course, undesirable: after all, it is this meeting with the writer that should prepare the emotional perception of the literary text" ^{[15, p. 13]}. The researcher identifies peculiar phases of students' mastering of biographical material, showing that each involves the use of methodological techniques, without which the writer's personality loses its individual features, dissolving into a number of other equally schematic or dotted silhouettes. The standard of studying a writer's biography is the formation of such ideas about the personality of a writer, which are based on unique characterological patterns. At the same time, it remains important to present the writer as a witness of a particular historical and cultural epoch, a member of a salon, circle, or other literary or institutional association (often associated with a particular publication or publishing house).

Following V. G. Marantsman, we believe that the study of "the biography of a writer becomes a necessary element of the correct comprehension of a literary text" ^{[16, p. 5]}. A teacher or professor is often likened to a biographer: By combining numerous complementary sources, they introduce students to the sum of other people's experiences. V. N. Drobot wrote about this, in particular: "A literature teacher should be concerned not only with the detailed specification of schoolchildren's ideas about the personality of a writer but also with reflections on a person's life, identifying ideological, moral and aesthetic overtones in the facts of biography, so studying it cannot be reduced to a chronologically ordered illustration" ^{[17, p. 15]}. The task of the addressees in this regard is to carefully "read" their proposed biography. Marantzman expresses a similar idea, pointing out that the story of life and work each time involves 1) searching for a particular narrative prism (or point of view); 2) choosing the material; 3) creating a "biographical key" ^{[16, p. 110]}. Since the "biographical key" concept is not specified in the methodological literature, we will focus on this in more detail.

By the biographical key, we mean such a matrix of ideas about a writer, including typological personality traits (their behavior in a certain literary environment) and individual traits (gestures and actions that distinguish a particular writer from others). The primary function of the biographical key is to help in reading and interpreting a work (not only by attracting biographical circumstances to the text but also vice versa by rejecting, changing, and recombining them). From the point of view of the methodology of teaching literature, the "form" and "material" of this key can vary: "understanding the writer's attitude to the events of the time, to the people, to history, to the true value of the human personality..." ^{[16, p. 112]}.

The book Theory and Methods of Teaching Literature describes the main types of classes for studying the biography of a writer: lesson/lecture, independent reports by schoolchildren, textbook work, correspondence excursions, concert lessons, and panorama lessons. As the authors of the manual note, in the study of biography, "... it is important to raise problematic issues, work on a plan, and use texts. To remove the textbook gloss, the idea of the infallibility of the writer's personality is no less important than finding an interesting aspect for students to understand not only the writer's greatness but also the complexity of the formation of personality and talent" ^[5].

In our practice, we have come across the fact that mastering major monographic topics often achieves the greatest effect when certain facts from the writer's life begin to act as a trigger. The fire at sea experienced by Turgenev, the Omsk prison, and Dostoevsky's years of hard labor, the Caucasian and Sevastopol impressions of Tolstoy significantly bring the student reader closer to the studied figure: a unique, often traumatic experience is perceived as a constituent property of interpretation. "A conversation with a writer will be immeasurably deeper, more exciting and direct," writes V.G. Marantsman, "if the student gets acquainted with the artist's inner world in the lessons, understands the uniqueness of their voice. It is difficult to talk to a complete stranger, so studying the biography and creative path of a writer turns out to be a natural and necessary support when analyzing a work of art" ^{[16, p. 55]}. V.N. Drobot expresses a similar thought: "students' understanding of the connection of the writer's personality with the work under study, its artistic concept, which is inevitably reflected in the choice of theme, ideological content, problematics, a system of images, composition, style, visual and expressive means, helps them to see the author's attitude to the reality depicted by him in a system of large and to make small generalizations, to understand his value position, to consider the work in the context of the social, political, and aesthetic life of the epoch" ^{[17, p. 101]}.

Thus, despite its thoroughness, the chronicle-oriented presentation of a writer's biography cannot be called an alternative method.

In our opinion, the somewhat outdated repetition of the basics of the biography of prominent people should be replaced by the technique of literary portrait, which requires creative activity from the teacher. Philologists, referring to epistolary and memoir texts (it is best to use the books of the series The Writer in the Memoirs of Contemporaries and The Life of Wonderful People), can create original lectures and conversations about years or decades, episodes, and vivid events in the lives of the writers being studied, corresponding to the characteristics of the audience. Let us refer to the methodological experience of T. Kurdyumova: "Many genres of biographical narrative are familiar to us and are fixed by practice. A host of circumstances determines the choice of each of them: the possibilities of age, the level of preparation of students, and the time that can be devoted to the story of life and creativity" ^{[16, p. 7]}. In an audience of international students, an essay, a novel, or a novella, all these artistic genres can be used to tell about a writer's personality. Special attention should be paid to the lexical organization of the fragments studied.

The technique of comparative descriptions or comparative literary portraits is no less productive. In generalizing, in our opinion, it would make sense to talk not only about some typological properties of the created works but also about the typology in the behavior of the studied figures of the literary process. In some cases, analogies can be productive: Pushkin and Stendhal (models of role behavior); Gogol and Balzac (author's reflection, attitude to literary work, writer as Prometheus and as Sisyphus), Tolstoy and Flaubert (two antagonists of world literature), Whitman and Mayakovsky (poet-tribune, glorifying en masse). These parallels are especially productive when studying Russian literature in an audience of trainee students from European universities. Still, Chinese students often show interest in comparative studies of writers from different literature. Of course, most of the analogies between Russian writers and authors of Chinese literature look far-fetched: Chinese culture has taken on too autonomous and peculiar a path of development compared to European culture. The most successful example is the comparison of Confucius and Tolstoy as the authors of books for reading, with the errors that inevitably arise here ^[17].

Thus, the observations made on the material of school lessons can be extended to classes in Russian literature among foreign readers, especially since modern methods and approaches make it possible to diversify this process significantly.

We base our experience of teaching the biography of a writer on the author's methodology, which has been tested at various times in the classrooms of philology students. Initially, the methodology was designed for future Russian language and literature teachers, and later, it was modified for students and masters of the Philological department (2019–2023) to master. The implementation of the project's final phase was related to testing the developed methods and approaches in the audience of international students at Xinjiang University (2023–2024). Let's present one of the possible trajectories of studying the biography of a writer in the aspect we are interested in, based on the movement from the general, represented by the global literary process, to the particular.

When studying the literature, we turn to big data and visualization tools—such capabilities are embedded in Google Ngram Viewer and Ruscorpora ^[18]. Ngram Viewer is a Google Books machine analysis system that allows you to build graphs based on the quantitative calculation of mentions of certain proper names. This makes it possible to tell about the writer in terms of reader demand ^[18]. For example, the query "Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Chekhov" in the Russian-language corpus (from 1890 to 1990) indicates that Pushkin enjoys the greatest citation in the Russian language environment, while the names of Dostoevsky and Chekhov are approximately at the same citation level. Repeated in the English literature corpus, the same query will convincingly show that Chekhov and Dostoevsky occupy the leading positions. The introduction of such an illustration will not take much time. Still, it will allow us to visually (quantitatively) show the interest of modern and historical readers in the writers of their time.

First Peer Review

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The list of publisher reviewers can be found here.

The subject of the research is the peculiarities of studying the biography of the writer by foreign students. The research methodology is based on a combination of theoretical and empirical approaches using methods of analysis, survey, observation, generalization, synthesis. The relevance of the research is due to the importance for modern society of identifying various cultural phenomena: fiction is one of the ways to learn culture, but the methodology of working with a literary text and a biography of a writer for native speakers and foreign-language students differs. The scientific novelty is due to the fact that the methodology of teaching literature lacks a variety of methods and approaches in studying the biography of the writer, based on empirical material, the author states the existing problems in the organization of this work and suggests ways to solve them. The article presents the author's methodology for studying the biography of the writer, tested both in Russian (future teachers of Russian language and literature, as well as students and masters of the philological department) and in a foreign-language audience (foreign students of Xinjiang University). The presentation style is scientific, structure, and content. The article is written in Russian literary language. The structure of the manuscript includes the following sections: introduction (contains the statement of the problem, the author argues the relevance of the chosen topic and provides a theoretical basis for the study); the main part (based on the results of the analysis of data from surveys of school graduates, questionnaires of undergraduate interns and the results of "entrance testing", the problems of work on the study of the writer's biography existing in modern methodology are indicated; the author demonstrates specific methodological solutions, special attention is paid to the technique of comparative descriptions or comparative literary portraits, productive in working with a foreign-speaking audience, the author presents specific illustrative examples of the application of the indicated approach in practical classes; the article demonstrates the author's methodology, tested in various audiences); conclusions (the author notes that at the present stage the main sources used when preparing for a lesson on the biography of a writer, the teacher is close to the sources of a professional biographer; for a productive and effective study of the biography of a writer, an integrated approach is needed, involving combining traditional text analysis with digital methods of analyzing the literary process and cultural life of the era; complex work with a literary text and a biography of a writer allows you to develop critical thinking skills, and for students from it will help to get rid of ingrained stereotypes about Russian culture); bibliography (includes 26 sources of domestic and foreign authors). The content generally corresponds to the title. Conclusions, the interest of the readership. The study is a comprehensive work on the study and systematization of the existing methodological experience of studying the biography of the writer. The author has worked on the development of methodological solutions and demonstrates the proven author's methodology, which can be used in the practice of teaching literature to both native speakers and foreign students. The proposed methodological solutions can become the basis for various types of textbooks. Recommendations to the author: 1. Perhaps there was some technical glitch when uploading the article, you need to correct the part following "to state a number of problems when studying the biography of the writer:". 2. In the body of the article, it is necessary to correct references to sources from the list of references in accordance with the requirements of the editorial board. 3. It is necessary to check the text of the manuscript for references to the primary sources of the cited quotations, as well as the correctness of the citation. 4. Bibliographic descriptions of some sources need to be adjusted in accordance with GOST and editorial requirements. It is appropriate to increase the proportion of works in the bibliography over the past 3 years. In general, the manuscript meets the basic requirements for scientific articles. The material is of interest to the readership and after completion can be published in the journal "Pedagogy and Education".

Second Peer Review

Peer reviewers' evaluations remain confidential and are not disclosed to the public. Only external reviews, authorized for publication by the article's author(s), are made public. Typically, these final reviews are conducted after the manuscript's revision. Adhering to our double-blind review policy, the reviewer's identity is kept confidential.
The list of publisher reviewers can be found here.

The subject of the research in the peer-reviewed work are the methods and approaches used in the study of the biography of the writer by foreign students. Taking into account the specifics of the subject, object, purpose and objectives of the work, the research uses general scientific methods of analysis and synthesis, a survey method (a survey of school graduates, a survey of undergraduate trainees), an interpretive analysis of selected material, a method of system analysis, a descriptive method, etc., which allowed researchers to identify a number of problems when studying the biography of the writer, for example, "the study of a writer's biography follows a monotonous pattern or scheme", "there are no systemic connections in the study of figures of the literary process", "the study of writers' figures is devoid of consistency, students do not correlate the texts in question with social, historical and ideological contexts, do not perceive writers as a social environment", etc. The relevance of the research is due to the importance of studying the biography of writers as a means of developing interest in reading programmatic and non-programmatic works and lies in the need to analyze existing and develop new methods and approaches in working with biographical material. The author(s) correctly note that "the study of the biography of a writer plays a key role in humanitarian education, recalling universal meanings and allowing to overcome the dichotomy of "writer" and "text", and appeal to Yang Rui's research, according to which "a unified approach to understanding the phenomenon of biography has not yet been developed, and in the methodology teaching literature still lacks a variety of methods and approaches when studying this material." In this regard, the stated research topic is very relevant and important at the present time. Fundamental and relevant works of Russian and foreign researchers such as Y. M. Lotman, O. Y. Bogdanova, S. A. Leonov, V. F. Chertov, V. N. Drobot, V. G. Marantsman, I. E. Kaplan, E. G. Mestergazi, T. Brazhe, Yang Rui, Zhou Shujuan, Gao served as the theoretical basis of scientific work. Fenglan et al. The bibliography of the article consists of 30 sources, meets the content requirements and is reflected on the pages of the article. The analysis of the theoretical material and its practical justification allowed the author(s) to come to the conclusion that "the combination of traditional text analysis with digital methods of analyzing the literary process and cultural life of the epoch is productive in modern methodology. Along with the monographic study of the writer's personality, it is methodologically justified to study individual stages or episodes, the story of which can be presented in a lively and direct form of a literary portrait. Studying the biography of a writer involves a constant expansion of the context, it is necessary to talk about contemporaries of writers and poets, describe the literary environment and literary life in order to create the impression of a continuous process, not an airless environment." The scientific novelty of the work lies in the development of the author's methodology for studying the biography of the writer. As explained in the work, "initially, the methodology was designed for future teachers of the Russian language and literature, later modified for mastering by students and masters of the philological department (2019-2023). The implementation of the final phase of the project was associated with the testing of the developed methods and approaches in the audience of foreign students of Xinjiang University (2023-2024)." Thus, it is noted that, starting to study, students turn to big data and visualization tools – such capabilities are embedded in Google Ngram Viewer and Ruscorpora. Upon completion of the work, at the first stage, students turn to a bio-bibliographic dictionary, which is organized according to the principle of identifying keywords in a large array of information texts. The movement from big data corpora begins to texts and contexts. Special attention is paid to the specifics of working with students from China. The theoretical and practical significance of the research is unconditional and lies in its contribution to solving modern problems related to the methods and approaches used by foreign students in studying the biography of the writer. The results of the work can be used in classes in the disciplines of the methodological cycle with university students and during their pedagogical practice, and can also be used in the lessons of the humanitarian and aesthetic cycles to form and develop interest in the personality of the writer. The material presented in the paper has a clear, logically structured structure. The style of presentation of the material tends to the scientific type. The article has a complete form; it is quite independent, original, will be interesting and useful to a wide range of people and can be recommended for publication in the scientific journal "Pedagogy and Education".