How Should One Write about Masters?

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to answer the question: how should one write about masters? It is a question about the narrative strategies of authors writing about masters. The presented analysis is based on five examples: (1) John A. Hall’s Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography, (2) Anita Burdman Feferman and Solomon Feferman’s Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic, (3) Edmund Leach’s Lévi-Strauss, (4) Andrzej Walicki’s Idee i ludzie. Próba autobiografii [Ideas and People. An Attempt at an Autobiography], and (5) Dialogues by Roman Jakobson and Krystyna Pomorska. Each text presents different rhetorical devices, authorial relations to the master, and academic aims. The paper concludes with a critical comparison of the five examples (with the addition of some other minor cases also discussed in the paper).

Keywords

• master
• mastery
• student
• master-disciple relation
• andrzej de lazari
• ernest gellner
• alfred tarski
• claude lévi-strauss
• andrzej walicki
• roman jakobson
• rhetoric
• narration