pathography

[puh-thog-ruh-fee]

noun

plural

pathographies 

1. a biography that focuses on the negative elements of its subject.

Word History and Origins

Origin of pathography¹

1910–20 for an earlier sense; popularized by Joyce Carol Oates, U.S. writer

Example Sentences

It is these sorts of insights — exploring his fallibility, his shortcomings and even his complicity in an uncaring system — that make Marsh’s writing so powerful and that allow him to transcend the usual pathography.

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Michiko Kakutani, reviewing “Sons of Camelot” in The New York Times in 2004, called the book a “group pathography that dwells predictably on death, dysfunction and bad luck.”

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But responsible biographers never set out to produce hagiography or pathography.

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“Then She Fell” addresses the ambiguity of that relationship, but without drifting into the polluted shallows of pathography.

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Set entirely in a hotel room in London not long before Garland’s death in 1969, “Rainbow” is theater as pathography.

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