THE
CAREER OF RENE WELLEK
Chapter One of Rene Wellek by Martin Burro,
Twayne Publishers, Boston,
1981
Europe and America
In the fall of 1978, the distinguished American
literary theorist, critical historian, and comparatist scholar René Wellek
spoke at the Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University,
on the occasion of an exhibition of his publications for the celebration of his
seventy-fifth birthday. After outlining the main tasks ahead of him, the
Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature looked back on his
writing life over the past fifty-four years and noted that his books reflected
the many changes in literary scholarship and criticism. Still, he hoped that
he had preserved his own integrity and a core of convictions. Wellek, whose impulse
has always been to help clarify the methodological Tower of Babel,
once explained: “My views and aspirations are best expounded in my books.” Many
literary scholars the world over know the convictions and aspirations in
Wellek’s books, if not in all of his hundreds of scattered essays and reviews.
Appealing also to the student of literature and criticism are the stages of
René Wellek’s remarkable development, particularly his formative years in Europe and the years preceding his acquiring American citizenship
in 1946.
I Vienna
René Wellek was born in
Vienna on
August 22, 1903, the oldest of three children. In this old Hapsburg
capital—cradle of much contemporary thought in psychology, medicine,
philosophy, politics, art, music, and literature—Wellek and his younger
brother, Albert (1904—1972), spent their boyhoods. The culture of Wellek’s
parents influenced his development profoundly. His father, Bronislav Wellek
(1872—1959), then a government lawyer, was a Czech from a petty-bourgeois
Catholic family in Prague.
Known as a Liedersänger, a
Wagnerian, and an opera reviewer, Bronislav Wellek also was an ardent Czech
nationalist and a biographer of the composer Bedrich Smetana and a translator
of the poets Jaroslav Vrchlicky and J. S. Machar. René Wellek’s mother, née Gabriele von Zelewsky (1881—1950),
came from a different background. Born in Rome,
she bloomed into a beauty who spoke German, Italian, French, and English. René
Wellek’s maternal grandfather was a West Prussian nobleman of Polish origin;
Wellek’s grandmother was a Swiss Protestant from picturesque Schaffhausen.
After the nobleman’s death, his widow, son, and daughter traveled on the Continent.
In Vienna,
Gabriele von Zelewsky met Bronislav Wellek.
In the crowded capital the young couple and their sons moved from
apartment to apartment. From 1906 to 1908 Bronislav Wellek served under the
Austrian prime minister, Baron von Beck, to whom he gave Czech lessons. In 1912
the Welleks settled in a large house with garden and terrace. At home and in
the kaleidoscopic Danubian metropolis, René and Albert grew up in an atmosphere
rich in linguistic, aesthetic, political, and religious overtones. Since the
Protestantism of their Swiss grandmother prevailed in the family, the Brothers
Wellek had been baptized in the Lutheran
Church. Even the agnostic
Bronislav became a nominal Lutheran.
As a boy René Wellek read voraciously. He and his brother developed
“crazes” for all kinds of encyclopedic and historical information—geography,
science, religion, literature, military campaigns. Familiar with Viennese
opera, René Wellek also took piano lessons. At school he and his brother spoke
German, but often encountered anti-Czech feeling. At home and on vacations in
the river valleys and pinewoods of Bohemia,
the brothers spoke Czech.
A month after he became ten, René Wellek started Latin lessons, and for eight
hours a week for eight years he read much of Livy, Cornelius Nepos, Caesar,
Cicero, Ovid, Vergil, Horace, Catullus, and Tacitus.
During the First World War, René Wellek recalls, food in Vienna grew scarce and
cannon boomed in the Carpathians. When he was thirteen he started Greek, and
during the next three years he read Xenophon, much Homer, some Plato and
Lucian. During his convalescence from scarlet fever, his father read to him
the whole of The Pickwick
Papers in German. When he
returned finally to the Wahring Gymnasium,
he was permitted to substitute English or French for his interrupted Creek
studies. Wellek’s choice of English influenced his life decisively. Though he
still spent long hours at his Latin, he grew increasingly sceptical of
mechanical instruction.
II Prague
With the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, the Welleks
(and infant Elizabeth) moved to the ancient cathedral city of Prague,
that picturesque settlement at the entrance to Eastern
Europe. “Czechoslovakia
after the war,” Wellek notes, “more than ever, stood at the crossroads of all
cultural influences, in consequence of her geographical position, her Slavonic
language and her Western sympathies.” Like his father—high in government
office— the schoolboy René Wellek identified with the new Czechoslovakia.
“The outcome of the great war, which for the Czechs meant the fulfillment of a
centuries-old desire, was a surprise and shock for the Germans in Bohemia and Moravia.”
Still, the first president of the Republic, Thomas Masaryk, hoped that Czechoslovakia
might become the Switzerland of Central Europe.
No English, however, was taught at Wellek’s Realgymnasium. Nevertheless, he continued to read English
literature at home, particularly Shakespeare and the Romantic poets. In school
he studied botany, history, geography, and three literatures—Latin, German, and
Czech. He read a good deal of Reformation history and became familiar with the
German classics. After reading Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, he puzzled over his
mother’s sentimental piety.
In 1922, Wellek entered Charles
University (the Czech
University of Prague). Though he viewed his father’s legal profession as boring,
he himself would become a masterful judge of evidence, of critical defense and
prosecution. Wellek prevailed upon his father to allow him to study Germanic
philology. Academe promised intellectual adventure and social responsibility,
art and learning, passion and judgment. At Charles University,
German historical scholarship still held sway, but often it collaborated with
criticism. Joseph Janko lectured on Gothic vocalism and consonantism, Arnost
Kraus on the Minnesänger, Otokar
Fischer on the life and poetry of Heine, F. X. Salda on Symbolism, and Václav
Tille on comparative folklore. From each Wellek learned, but from each he
withheld total allegiance. Fascinated by the judgmental boldness of Friedrich
Gundolf ‘s Shakespeare und
der deutsche Geist (1911) and Goethe (1916), Wellek in 1923 visited Heidelberg to hear Gundolf lecture;
after calling on him, however, Wellek was repelled by Gundolf ‘s adoring cult
of Stefan George.
At Charles
University, Wellek
enjoyed the lectures on English literary history given by the highly regarded
Czech scholar and teacher Vilém Mathesius (1882—1945). The noble and polite Mathesius,
Wellek later wrote, was “the type of the Czech scholar who grew up under Austria in the
tradition of Czech Protestantism, with Masaryk as a model in mind, who devoted
himself to the building of the nation between the wars.” During
Mathesius’s sudden loss of sight, Wellek (who then cared only for Shakespeare
and the Romantic and Victorian poets) read portions of The Fairie Queene to him and observed that often Mathesius’s responses to Spenser
went beyond the conventions of nineteenth-century positivistic philology.
Mathesius, in fact, encouraged his students to free themselves from fanatic
German factualism and to write Czech exposition in the simple, clear style of
the English. Though Mathesius seemed to Wellek insufficiently concerned with
the problem of evil and tragedy, with irrationality and the interior life
Mathesius instilled in him “a sane respect for order, tradition, common sense,
lucidity distrust of the merely new, the pretentious and opaque. . . a concern
for genuine discovery, for the frontiers of knowledge.”
III Wandering
Scholar
With his father’s financial help, Wellek in 1924 spent two months in England
preparing his thesis on “Thomas Carlyle and Romanticism” and responding
favorably to the Metaphysical revival. The next year he and other Czech
students, under the auspices of the British Union of students, visited Cambridge, Birmingham, Liverpool,
Oxford, Bristol,
and London. As
an undergraduate Wellek began publishing his efforts in Czech books and
periodicals His first essay, in Fischer and Salda’s review Kritika, took to task J. V. Sládek’s Czech
translation of Romeo and
Juliet. Other early
essays are on Byron and Shelley, early reviews on various studies in Czech,
English, French, and German. Under Mathesius, Wellek completed his thesis on
Carlyle: Wellek argues that Carlyle fought the Enlightenment with weapons from
German Romanticism, but remained a Puritan. In June 1926, at age twenty-three,
Wellek received the degree Doctor of Philology.
Supported by the Czech Ministry of Education,
Wellek once more visited England,
this time to prepare a monograph on Andrew Marvell in relation to Baroque and
Latin poetry. But at Oxford,
where he met Mario Praz, Wellek was surprised to learn that the French scholar
Pierre Legouis was preparing a large book on Marvell. With recommendations from
Oxford Wellek applied to the Institute
of International Education, and in the
fall of 1927 he went to Princeton as a Procter
Fellow of English. He spent a busy year in the regular graduate seminars of
Thomas M. Parrott, Robert K. Root, Charles C. Osgood, and Morris W. Croll.
Unfortunately, Wellek’s seminar assignments were much like those of his early
years in Germanic philology. At the time, Princeton
offered no modern or American literature. Wellek, however, managed to read H.
L. Mencken, Van Wyck Brooks, and the New Humanists.
Since there was no opening for him at Prague,
Wellek remained in the United States
and taught German the next year at Smith
College. The following
year he returned to Princeton to teach German.
Having avoided at Prague the professors of
positivistic philosophy, at Princeton he
attended Ledger Wood’s seminar on Hegel’s Logic. Wellek’s thesis
on Carlyle had led him to Coleridge, and Coleridge led him to Kant and
Schelling. During this period, Wellek decided that the topic of his second
thesis (Habilitation) would be the
influence of Kant on English thought. Wellek then voyaged home by way of England. At the
British Museum he scrutinized Coleridge’s
manuscript “Logic,” amazed to see the fair and unfair use Coleridge made of
Kant.
IV Privatdozent
Back at Charles University by the fall of 1930, Wellek completed Immanuel Kant in England: 1793—1838. Though Mathesius had reservations about the subject
of the Habilitation, he advised
Wellek to enhance his chances of securing a professorship by writing a paper on
the Middle English poem The
Pearl. Wellek passed his Docentura, basing his inaugural lecture
(“The Two Englands: Empiricism and Idealism in English Literature”) on an entry
in Coleridge’s notebooks. Writes Wellek: “I developed the contrast between the
two traditions with an unconcealed preference for the Platonic idealistic
poetic tradition.” Still, Mathesius selected Wellek as his eventual successor
as Professor of the History of English Literature.
From 1930 to 1935 Wellek lived in Prague.
He became an active junior member of the famous Prague Linguistic Circle,
translated Joseph Conrad’s Chance and
D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers into
Czech, taught English as a Privatdozent, and
wrote in Czech, English and German for a variety of Czech journals. In 1932
Wellek married Olga Brodská, an elementary-school teacher from Moravia. Wellek early
surveyed the work of the Cambridge
critics—I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, and William Empson— and contributed
articles and reviews to Slovo
a slovesnost, journal of the Prague Linguistic Circle.
He further developed his
considerable skill in textual analysis, formulation of theory, and
reasoned evaluation. Believing that history can be written only from a sense of
direction, Wellek as early as 1932 sought in his paper on “Wordsworth’s and
Coleridge’s Theories of Poetic Diction” for anticipations of the views of the
Russian Formalists and the Czech Structuralists. Of great interest to Wellek
at this time were the theories of Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, Jan
Mukarovsky, and Roman Ingarden.
V London
Since prospects for a professorship at Prague
seemed remote, Wellek from 1935 to 1939 was Lecturer in Czech Language and
Literature at the School of Slavonic Studies of the University of London.
Sponsored there by the Czechoslovak Ministry of Education, Wellek also gave
six public lectures a year on Czech culture. During these London years, he contributed his important
“Theory of Literary History” to the sixth volume of Travaux du Cercle Lingulstique de Prague (1936, pp. 173—81). Wellek notes that
this essay for the first time in English discusses Russian Formalism and
Ingarden’s phenomenology. Wellek argues against merely accumulating facts
about literature, against reducing literature to historical information. He
advocates concentrating on the actual works of art themselves, on bridging the
gulf between content and form.
In Cambridge
in the summer of 1936, Wellek for the first time met F. R. Leavis. Though
Wellek’s views in many areas coincided with those of the Cambridge group, his famous or notorious
letter in Scrutiny in 1937 charged Leavis in his Revaluation (1936) with an inadequate appreciation
of idealism as it descends from Plato, with underrating the coherence and
comprehensibility of the Romantic view of the world. Leavis wrongly
countercharged that Wellek was an abstract philosopher with an inadequate
appreciation of sensitive concrete criticism. Wellek replied that he had
intended only to show that literary criticism directed against the soundness of
thought is invalid.
As Bronislav Wellek before World War I had transmitted Czech culture to Austria, so René Wellek before World War II
transmitted Czech culture to England.
Several of Wellek’s thoughtful, factual accounts of Czech history and the Czech
situation stem from this period. In London
and environs, in speech and print, he sought help for his threatened homeland
by acquainting the English with venerable Anglo-Czech relations, with Czech
writers and values. Still, Neville Chamberlain, to Wellek’s utter dismay, let
the little country go. After Hitler’s troops marched into Prague in the spring of 1939, the Third Reich
halted Wellek’s salary.
VI Iowa
American scholars came to Wellek’s aid. Thomas Parrott informed Norman
Foerster of Wellek’s plight. Foerster, as Director of the School of Letters
at the State University of Iowa, invited Wellek to join the English Department
as a lecturer on a one-year appointment. Having ascertained the exact location
of Iowa City on a map in the British Museum,
Wellek and his wife gratefully sailed for America in June. Before the trip to
Iowa, Wellek
worked at Yale for six weeks on the manuscript of his Rise of English Literary History. The Welleks moved into a newly rented
house in Iowa City on September 1, 1939—the day
World War II broke out in Europe.
At Iowa,
Wellek at first taught courses in the Humanities and the European novel. There
he met several stimulating colleagues, among them Austin Warren. Reappointed,
Wellek soon taught a seminar in German-English literary and intellectual
relations. In the stormy debate in American universities between scholars and
critics (history versus values, facts versus ideas), Wellek naturally supported
Foerster’s Neohumanist reforms. Like England,
America
lacked theoretical awareness. Its scholarship was antiquarian, its criticism
impressionistic. To the collective volume Literary Scholarship: Its Aims and Methods (1941) Wellek contributed a revised version of his “Theory of
Literary History.” That same year the University of North
Carolina also published his Rise of English Literary History. Wellek became an associate professor
at Iowa and
associate editor of Philological
Quarterly (1941—46).
At meetings of the newly founded English Institute in the early 1940s,
Wellek met William K. Wimsatt, Cleanth
Brooks, and Allen Tate.
Robert Penn Warren twice taught at Iowa
as a visiting professor. Though Continental and American perceptions naturally
differed, Wellek was impressed with these “New Critics.” Sensing the
limitations of New Humanism, Wellek and Austin Warren decided to write Theory of Literature, a book stressing the nature, function,
form, and content of literature as well as its relation to neighboring but
distinct disciplines. The needed book, surveying literary theory, practice,
scholarship, history, and pedagogy, would bring together Wellek’s insights into
Slavic Formalism/Structuralism and Warren’s into American New Criticism. To
expedite the collaboration, Wellek enlarged the scope of his reading in
American scholarship while Warren
read more European studies.
Meanwhile, Wellek accepted Louis Wright’s invitation to work as a Fellow
at the Huntington Library during the summer of 1942— on what Wellek imagined
would be the second installment of his Rise of English Literary History (since Thomas Warton to the present). In the spring of 1943
Wellek’s son Ivan was born. Because of the war Wellek naturally lost touch with
the Prague Circle;
nevertheless, he intensified his theoretical interests. At the center of his
convictions were the autonomy of the aesthetic experience, the human meaning of
art, the necessity for responsible interpretation, the interdependence of
theory and experience, and the interconnection of analysis, interpretation,
and evaluation.
As Director of the Language and Area Program in Czech (1943—44), René
Wellek’s function was to produce oral interpreters for the United States Army.
He was promoted to full professor in 1944, but his grinding stint as language
director had retarded progress on Theory of Literature. With
support from the Rockefeller Foundation, however, Wellek and Warren spent the
war-concluding summer of 1945 in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. Enthusiastically
the Czech and the American wrote, exchanged, discussed, and revised chapters.
Of Austin Warren as writer and teacher, Wellek observes: “Working with him was
a course in style, in the art of exposition, in the clarity of formulation.”
VII New Haven
In the fall they returned to Iowa, but
Wellek, having learned Mathesius had died shortly before the liberation,
considered returning to Prague.
Yale University, however, offered him a post,
and Wellek became a naturalized American citizen in May 1946. That same year
Yale presented him with an honorary Master of Arts degree, and he joined the
editorial board (1946—50) of the Modern Language Association.
Still working on Theory of Literature,
Wellek in the fall of 1946 became Professor of Slavic and Comparative
Literature at Yale. There was no chair, no program, no department then, but
Wellek sensed that the time was growing ripe for expansion. Soon there would be
125 undergraduates in his Survey of the Russian Novel. Wellek rightly insisted
that one cannot study a single literature in isolation. All literature is
interdependent, particularly the literature descending from Greece and Rome.
Ideas, forms, genres, themes, motifs, techniques, metrics, stock characters,
and much more cross all language barriers. Professors of literature in whatever
language or languages must recognize as an ideal the supernational history of
literature.
Warren
visited Wellek in New Haven the next two
summers, but the illness and subsequent death of Warren’s
wife necessitated that Wellek write chapters originally assigned to Warren. Though Theory of Literature bears a 1949 publication date, most of
the book was written between 1945—47, and it incorporates earlier papers,
including Wellek’s well-known chapter “The Mode of Existence of a Literary Work
of Art,” first published in the Southern Review in
1942. In the summer of 1947 WeIlek lectured on literary theory at the University of Minnesota,
and the next summer on the history of criticism at Columbia University,
returning to Yale in the fall as chairman of his department. Meanwhile, Warren left Iowa for the University of Michigan.
Though not conceived as a textbook, Theory of Literature caught on in American graduate schools.
In a short time, it became a vade mecum. Today
it is an academic best-seller, in twenty-two translations. Though
the book often is associated with New Criticism, Wellek objects to being called
a New Critic. Thanks to the fusion of the German-Slavic and Anglo-American
critical traditions in Theory
of Literature, students and
professors of literature the world over have become cognizant of essential
distinctions and of the cardinal idea that “a literary work of art is not a
simple object but rather a highly complex organization of a stratified
character with multiple meanings and relationships.”
To the first issue of Comparative Literature, on whose editorial board he is still a member, Wellek contributed
his well-known refutation of Arthur 0. Lovejoy’s argument in 1924 against the
unity of Western Romanticism. In the summer of 1949, Wellek joined John Crowe
Ransom, Allen Tate, and Yvor Winters as a Fellow at the Kenyon School.
Following the publication of Theory
of Literature, Wellek put his
greatest labors after teaching and administration into his monumental A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950, a projected
five (now projected six) volume magnum
opus of modern critical developments, primarily in France, England,
Germany, Italy, Russia, and America. The work would support or correct Theory of Literature.
VIII Profession
of Criticism
Since mid-century a flow of publications has issued from Wellek’s
pen—books, essays, surveys, reviews, notes, letters—on European and American
philosophy, aesthetics, and history of ideas; on literary theory, history, and
criticism; on periods, developments, and movements; on style, methodology, and
pedagogy; on critics, scholars, and—himself. His many reviews on American,
English, German, Czech, Polish, Russian, French, and Italian criticism are
crisp and balanced. His letters and comments in learned journals contribute to
critical inquiry, to a sense of intellectual community.
In 1955, Yale
University Press released the first two volumes of the History—The Later Eighteenth Century and The Romantic Age. “There
is no other history like it,” declared David Daiches, “none which combines its
scope with its sense of contemporary relevance.” For Wellek’s sixtieth
birthday, in 1963, the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences in America honored
him with Essays on Czech
Literature, nine of his key
Czech writings in English, with a bibliography of more than a hundred Wellek
writings in Czech and on Czech/Slavic topics. That same year Yale published
Wellek’s more unified collection, Concepts of Criticism. These
fifteen influential papers, dating from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s,
define problems of method and periodization, set conceptual ideals, and measure
results against literature itself. To Emerson R. Marks, “No available
alternative to the structuralism which he propounds bears so well the test of
literature itself.” Exclusive of about sixty items in Czech, the
bibliography covers all of Wellek’s writings to the end of 1962.
Two years after the publication of Concepts, Princeton
University Press, having put its imprimatur in 1931 on the printing in
Czechoslovakia of Kant in England, appropriately published Wellek’s third collection, six essays
under the unambiguous title Confrontations:
Studies in the Intellectual and Literary Relations Between Germany, England, and the United States during the Nineteenth
Century. Howard Mumford Jones pronounced René Wellek “the most erudite
man in America.“
When Yale in 1965 released the eagerly awaited third and fourth volumes of
Wellek’s critical History—The Age of Transition and
The Later Nineteenth Century—it was welcomed as “the most comprehensive
and balanced account of the history of criticism in the modern age.“ In 1970,
Yale published Wellek’s fourth essay collection (and bibliography from 1963
through 1969) Discriminations: More Concepts of
Criticism. Among many others, R. Cordon Cox pointed up Wellek’s “vast
range of reference” and “encyclopedic knowledge of critical writing.“
Like most flourishing
scholar-critics, Wellek constructs his books largely from his essays. Often
these are lectures-turned-essays, one reason for their directness and clarity.
Nearly all forty-two Wellek pieces that constitute Essays on Czech Literature, Concepts of Criticism, Confrontations, and Discriminations were culled from academic quarterlies and scholarly books. One
runs across his essays and reviews in the whole gamut of learned journals—from American Literature to Zeitschrlft der Savigny—Stiftung.
One finds first or second versions, whole or partial reprints, or
translations of his essays in a host of collections, annuals, festschrifts,
editions, and reference works.
Over his long career,
Wellek has reviewed more than a hundred scholarly books written in various
Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages. His reviews display the range of his
essays and books. Venturously, he has assessed a scholarly book on Old Korean
poetry for Comparative
Literature, and even an issue of Yale Literary Magazine for Yale Daily News. Most of his reviews,
of course, treat works in English on modern Western literature and literary
study. Wellek’s reviews crop up in dozens of journals, many in Comparative Literature and Philological Quarterly. Wellek’s
ingenuity in carrying ideas from one book to the next, in constructing books
from essays and reviews, and in informing these shorter forms, in turn, with
arresting passages from his books (particularly Theory of Literature and History of
Criticism) makes for organic
unity, for coherence and continuity.
Though the gusto of the
great nineteenth-century critical historian George Saintsbury is more intrusive
than that of his twentieth-century counterpart, Wellek’s work also has a
definite critical personality. The personality reflects habitual diligence,
patience and tact. There is erudition and introspection, system and vision,
openness and independence, reason and enthusiasm. Judicious, subtle, and sober,
the persona at times is dryly humorous—as when Adam Muller seems to celebrate “sentimental
pan-sexuality” when addressing lady audiences, or when Friedrich Hebbel notes
down his and his wife’s dreams “with the pedantry of a confirmed Freudian,” or
when the few today who want to burn with Pater’s gemlike flame “are usually
very young indeed,” or when Paul Valery simply cannot compare period
terms to bottle labels—”Pabst Blue Ribbon or Liebfrauenmilch”—or when the word critique gives “a somewhat superior air
to a humble book review,” or when “it may be reassuring” to know that statistically
nonconformists are more aesthetic than conformists, or when one
fails to find the word classicismo in
such obvious sources as ”Milizia, Cicognara, Ennio Quirino, Visconti. . .
Canova,“ or when Wellek, having counted the phrase “Widerspiegelung der Wirklichkeit” (“reflection of reality”) 1,032
times in Volume One of Georg Lukács’s Aesthetik, concludes,
“I was too lazy or bored to count it in Volume Two.”
Wellek’s distinguished writings have gained him distinguished honors.
Particularly satisfying to the academic man of letters is the honorary degree
bestowed upon him by a jury of his fellow academics. Esteemed at home, Wellek
the American comparatist is particularly hailed among the international
community of scholars. In 1958, Lawrence
College granted Wellek his first
honorary doctorate; in 1975, the University
of East Anglia, his
twelfth. Between, Wellek had received honorary doctorates from Harvard, Oxford, Rome, Maryland, Boston
College, Columbia,
Montreal, Louvain,
Michigan, and Munich.
Of course, an academic writer whose erudition is as gargantuan as
Wellek’s needs financial as well as moral support, large blocks of time for
reading, thinking, discoursing, and writing. Foundations and agencies have
heeded Wellek’s call. To receive a Guggenheim Fellowship is a great
distinction: Wellek has received three. In 1951—52, he worked on his History, first in New Haven and later in Italy,
Switzerland, and Germany. His 1956—57 Guggenheim enabled him again to work
without interruption in New Haven and later to
visit Czechoslovakia.
On his third, 1966—67, Wellek returned to Italy,
mainly to Rome and Sicily. Before, between, and after the
Guggenheims, however, others backed Wellek’s critical labors. In 1958 the
Distinguished Service Award came from the American Council of Learned
Societies. The next year he was Fulbright Research Scholar in Italy, in Florence
and Rome.
Grants from the Rockefeller and Bollingen Foundations allowed Wellek to take another
leave from academic duties in 1963—64. In 1972 he was Senior Fellow of the
National Endowment for the Humanities.
An inevitable outcome of outstanding scholarship, professorial charm,
and administrative dexterity seems to be election to various professional
committees and offices. Active in comparative literature sections of the Modern
Language Association, René Wellek was also on the editorial board (1953—54) and
the executive council (1959—60). At the time he was MLA vice president (1964),
he was also president of three other associations: the International Comparative
Literature Association (1961—64), the American Comparative Literature Association
(1962—65), and the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences in America
(1962—66). Except for the first ICLA Congress in Venice, Wellek has lectured at every Congress.
Besides reading papers regularly at ACLA meetings, he organized the 1970
meeting at Yale.
Such repute brought invitations to lecture and to teach. And highly
successful lecturing and teaching begat more invitations. Long before his
retirement from Yale in 1972, Wellek from time to time had accepted temporary
teaching assignments elsewhere. In 1950, he taught a weekly seminar in the
Enlightenment at Harvard, gave nine guest lectures as part of the Gauss Seminar
in Literary Criticism at Princeton, and became
a Fellow of the Indiana School of Letters. (Still chairman of Yale’s Slavic
Department, he became Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature in 1952.)
The next year, he made a return engagement as a visiting professor at Harvard.
In 1961, a year after he became chairman of Yale’s outstanding Department of
Comparative Literature, he was a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii;
in 1963, at the University of California, Berkeley;
and in the summer of 1969, Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer in Germany.
IX Wandering
Scholar Emeritus
After the death of his first wife in 1967, René Wellek married Nonna
Dolodarenko Shaw, a Russian émigré, herself then a professor of Russian
literature at the University
of Pittsburgh. In 1972,
at age sixty-nine, Wellek retired from Yale. As director of the graduate
program in comparative literature since 1947, he had directed over fifty Doctor
of Philosophy dissertations, many now published. Wellek once wrote: “I trust
the company who have come from the department have, whatever the variety of
conviction they hold and interests they pursue, at least two things in common:
devotion to scholarship and complete freedom to follow their own bent.“ Indebtedness
to Wellek has been expressed in the form of anniversary volumes, special
issues, dedications, acknowledgments, and ubiquitous footnotes.
In spite of academic retirement, René Wellek’s academic vita continues to burgeon. In 1973 he
was a Visiting Professor at Princeton, and in 1974 he was Patton Professor of Comparative
Literature at Indiana
University. In London that year, he
became president of the Modern Humanities Research Association. The following
spring, under circumstances far happier than those in 1939, René Wellek, as
Distinguished Visiting Professor, returned to the University of Iowa.
In 1977, as Senior Fellow of the Society of the Humanities, he conducted a
seminar at Cornell
University. In 1979, he
taught at the University of California, San
Diego. Later that year, at the opening ceremony of the
Innsbruck Congress of ICLA, René Wellek received the Verdienstkreuz 1. Klasse für Kunst und Wissenschaft and in the fall
was Walker-Ames Professor at the University
of Washington.
In America
and in Europe the irresistible “critic of
critics” still lectures in his rapid, Czech-accented delivery. He continues to
serve on committees and editorial boards. His various studies and defenses of
literary criticism continue to astonish and inspire. Wellek’s memberships in
learned societies, it might be well to note here, include the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Bavarian Academy,
the British Academy,
the Connecticut Academy,
the Italian National
Academy, the Linguistic Society of America, and the Royal Netherlands
Academy. At his 1978
birthday celebration at Yale, René Wellek defined as his central pursuits the
completion of the fifth and sixth volumes of his History of Criticism and the revision of his early, still valid, Kant in England. When asked how he likes retirement
from academic duties at Yale, the sturdy, indefatigable, white-haired scholar
quips, “I enjoy it but miss my vacations.”
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