Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The retrospective study, often by a physician, of the possible influence and effects of disease on the life and work of a historical personage or group.
- noun A style of biography that overemphasizes the negative aspects of a person's life and work, such as failure, unhappiness, illness, and tragedy.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A description of disease.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A
biography that focuses on faults, unlucky circumstances, failures, and other negative aspects of the person's life. - noun medicine A
biography by a physician exploring the effects a disease may have had on a person's life.
Etymologies
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Examples
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Maraniss's balanced biography is not a "pathography," obsessive about its subject's defects.
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Many bestselling memoirs and biographies are what Joyce Carol Oates has called “pathography,” or books that focus on the pathological.
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Broyard wrote this before the boom in what Joyce Carol Oates has called “pathography,” or biography and autobiography that focus on the sordid.
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Broyard wrote this before the boom in what Joyce Carol Oates has called “pathography,” or biography and autobiography that focus on the sordid.
The Best Things I Never Wrote: Quote of the Day, #3 « One-Minute Book Reviews 2007
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Yet even as late as 1986, "My Way" -- which led an entire generation to believe that Sinatra was a raging egomaniac -- was still so identified with the singer that Kitty Kelly gave her hatchet job of a Sinatra pathography the title "His Way."
Sinatra vs. 'My Way' 2009
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Broyard wrote this before the boom in what Joyce Carol Oates has called “pathography,” or biography and autobiography that focus on the sordid.
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To do so means navigating between the Scylla of hagiography and the Charybdis of what Joyce Carol Oates called pathography.
'Friendlyvision' 2009
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Try writing that life as anything but pathography.
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With a life as disastrous as Garland's, there's nothing inappropriate about down-and-dirty pathography.
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But the reasons for it are changing in the era of what Joyce Carol Oates has called “pathography,” or biography that focuses on the pathological.
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Like any affecting graphic pathography, Durand’s work illustrates the experience of illness in ways both personal and universal. Her drawings are lively and loose, matching the gestures of many of the characters, giving the story a kinetic energy.
Graphic Medicine—The Best of 2021 For Authors 2021
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