Leo Spitzer

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Leo Spitzer (born February 7, 1887 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary ; died September 16, 1960 in Forte dei Marmi , Italy ) was an Austrian Romance philologist and literary theorist with American citizenship. His work, especially in the field of text interpretation and style , was groundbreaking.

life and work

As a student of Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke , Leo Spitzer received his doctorate in 1910 with his thesis "Word formation as a stylistic means exemplified by Rabelais " . Spitzer initially taught as a private lecturer at the University of Vienna (1913) and worked for the Austrian censorship authority during the First World War , where from 1915 he used his responsibility for letters from Italian prisoners of war for extensive analyzes of idioms and stylistic processes, thus establishing the discourse analysis . In 1920 he went to Bonn and in 1925 became a full professor for Romance linguistics , first at the University of Marburg , then (as successor to Etienne Lorck ) at the University of Cologne (1930). There he was also involved in the establishment of the Portuguese-Brazilian Institute (1932), which today is one of the most important centers of German-language Lusitan Studies.

After the transfer of power to the National Socialists in 1933, he was dismissed because of his Jewish origins on the basis of the so-called Aryan paragraph and emigrated to Istanbul in 1933 . His student Hans Marchand followed him a year later. Here he built up a chair for European philology and became head of the foreign language school at the university . Spitzer spoke up to ten languages. In 1936 he went to the USA and took a chair in Romance languages at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore . In 1955 Spitzer received an Antonio Feltrinelli Prize . In 1956 he retired. Since 1946 he was a member of the Accademia della Crusca in Florence and since 1958 a corresponding member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences .

Contrary to his positivistic education, he followed the idealistic approach of Benedetto Croce and Karl Vossler in literary research . His method is based on attentive, detail-oriented reading, in which the literary and language-analytical ( linguistic ) understanding of the text intermesh or combine to form a stylistic interpretation of the literature. On the basis of a comparison of the formal and linguistic characteristics of writers from different epochs, he thus arrives at a uniform, generally applicable representation of individual author styles. His text analysis, which is more intuitive than empirical and which emphasizes the creative aspect of language, is what he himself describes as a “circle in understanding”.

The two volumes of the style studies (1928) are to be regarded as his main work . Since 2013, the University of Cologne has been awarding a Leo Spitzer Prize to promote cutting-edge research by humanities and humanities at the Cologne University.

Aftermath

Since 2013, the University of Cologne has awarded the Leo Spitzer Prize and the Leo Spitzer Prize for young scientists in the humanities and humanities as part of the Future Prizes funding concept . The funding amounts are € 80,000 and € 40,000 respectively.

Fonts (selection)

literature

  • Bernhard Hurch:  Spitzer, Leo. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 24, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-428-11205-0 , pp. 722-724 ( digitized version ).
  • E. Kristina Baer & Daisy E. Shenholm (Eds.): Leo Spitzer on Language and Literature. A Descriptive Bibliography . Modern Language Association, New York 1991
  • Wolfgang Bandhauer: Comments on Elise Richter critical of ideology (in confrontation with Leo Spitzer) . In: German and Austrian Romanists as persecuted by National Socialism . Edited by Hans Helmut Christmann & Frank-Rutger Hausmann. Stauffenburg, Tübingen 1989 ISBN 3923721609 p. 231ff. (and passim, see register, with 37 locations) Series: Romanica et comparatistica vol. 10
  • James V. Catano: Language, history, style. Leo Spitzer and the critical tradition . Routledge, London 1988
  • Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht : "Method is experience". Leo Spitzer's style . In: ders .: On the life and death of the great Romanists . Munich / Vienna: Carl Hanser Verlag , 2002; Pp. 72-151 ISBN 3-446-20140-8
  • Helmut Hatzfeld: Leo Spitzer (1887-1960) . In: Hispanic Review . Vol. 29, No. 1 (January 1961), ISSN  0018-2176 , pp. 54-57.
  • Frank-Rutger Hausmann : "Devoured by the vortex of events". German Romance Studies in the “Third Reich” . 2nd Edition. Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 2008, pp. 309–336 ISBN 978-3-465-03584-8
  • Utz Maas : Persecution and emigration of German-speaking linguists 1933–1945. Entry on Leo Spitzer (accessed: April 15, 2018)
  • René Wellek: Leo Spitzer (1887-1960) . In: Comparative Literature . Vol. 12, No. 4, (Fall 1960), pp. 310-334. (Obituary)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Portuguese-Brazilian Institute: About the Institute , accessed December 7, 2009
  2. ↑ Hans Marchand † In: Anglia . Journal of English Philology. Volume 1979 (97) Mouton de Gruyter - Jan 1, 1979, p. 19ff.
  3. ^ Membership list of the Crusca
  4. ^ Members of the HAdW since it was founded in 1909. Leo Spitzer. Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. In the 1950s he held guest lectures at various German universities (e.g. Heidelberg and Freiburg)., Accessed on June 13, 2016 .
  5. ↑ Leo Spitzer Prize. Retrieved May 22, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Spitzer, Leo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Spitzer, Siegfried Leo (full name at birth)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian Romance philologist and literary theorist
DATE OF BIRTH February 7, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH September 16, 1960
Place of death Forte dei Marmi