OBITUARY
René
Wellek, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale,died on
November 10, 1995, after a long illness. He was 92 years old.
Ren
Wellek's association with Comparative Literature began even before the
appearance of its first issue. He was a member of the group within the Modern
Language Association that worked to create an American journal in our field. He
subsequently became one of the five members of the original Editorial Board
appointed by the president of the University of Oregon in 1948; at his request,
his name remained on our masthead after the accident in 1986 that left him
bedridden and unable to participate actively in the work of evaluating
manuscripts that he had done faithfully for so many years. His central role in
shaping the new journal is revealed in his extensive correspondence with its
first editor, Chandler Beall. He was especially pleased that a former student,
whose dissertation he had directed, succeeded Chandler Beall as Editor on the
latter's retirement.
Sarah
Lawall's "Ren Wellek and Modern Literary Criticism," CL 40
(1988), 3-24, is an excellent introduction to his conception of literary
scholarship, which gives equal attention to criticism, theory and history. His
greatest achievement is his monumental History of Modern Criticism, which was
completed after the publication of Professor Lawall's essay.
In
1955, when the first two volumes of the History appeared, Wellek planned to
bring his account down to the present in two further volumes. The two
additional volumes eventually became six; the last appeared in March 1993, only
a few months before the author's 90th birthday. The work was completed in
extremely difficult conditions while he was confined to bed in a nursing home
and forced to dictate the text which he then revised in typescript.
The
great virtue of the History is Wellek's insistence on examining all the
writings of each critic he studies, on confronting them with the literary works
they discuss, and on setting forth his own reactions to both as
clearly
and fairly as possible. His later writings are more personal than his earlier
ones, perhaps because, as he notes in a retrospective glance at his History, he
had become that criticism deals with what the philosopher W B Gallie calls
"essentially contested concepts." One can say of the History, as
Wellek's friend Erich Auerbach said of his own Mimesis, that it is "ganz
bewusst en Buch, das ein bestimmter Mensch, in einer bestimmten
Lage...geschrieben
hat."
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Comparative Literature, Winter 1996
©Thomas R Hart
20.11.2008
http://www.the-rathouse.com/ReneWellek.html
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Katrin Blatt
kablatt@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de Valčncia Press