René Wellek

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

René Wellek (born August 22, 1903 in Vienna , † November 10, 1995 in Hamden , Connecticut ) was a Czech-American literary scholar.

Wellek is best known for the Theory of Literature (1949), co-authored with Austin Warren , one of the most influential works of its kind in the 20th century. This manifesto for a fixed apparatus of methods in literary studies cannot be assigned to any “school” of literary theory, but it took up many impulses from text-oriented approaches such as European structuralism , Russian formalism and New Criticism .

Life

René Wellek was born on August 22, 1903 as the eldest son of a middle-class family in Vienna. His younger brother Albert Wellek (1904–1972) would later become one of the founders of modern music psychology ; he was a professor of psychology in Mainz. Wellek's mother Gabriele, née von Zelewsky, daughter of a West Prussian aristocrat of Polish descent and a Swiss woman, gave her three children a Lutheran upbringing. His father, Bronislav Wellek, was a Czech lawyer who, although employed at the Viennese court, was still an ardent Czech nationalist. Among other things, he gave Czech lessons to the Austrian Prime Minister Freiherr von Beck . Wellek first attended high school in Währing . After the end of the First World War and the collapse of Austria-Hungary, the family moved to Prague, the capital of the newly founded Czechoslovakia . The enthusiasm for the first Czech nation-state and especially the admiration for the state founder Tomáš Masaryk had a lasting impact on Wellek's political awareness.

After graduating from high school, he enrolled at Charles University in 1922 . He mainly attended lectures on German and English literature and received his doctorate in 1926 with a thesis on Thomas Carlyle's relationship to Romanticism. After a short study visit to Oxford, he went to the USA in 1927 and did research at Princeton University . In 1928 he taught German at Smith College , 1929–1930 again at Princeton. After his return to Prague he completed his habilitation in 1931 with the work Immanuel Kant in England: 1793-1838 , a study of the reception of Kant by the English Romantics. In 1932 he married the elementary school teacher Olga Brodská.

In the following years, Wellek taught English language and literature as a private lecturer . He also wrote numerous articles for various humanities publications. His close contact with the Prague linguistic circle around Roman Jakobson , to whose magazine Slovo a Slovesnost he regularly contributed reviews and literary articles, had consequences for Wellek's literary understanding. To the sixth volume of the Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague he contributed the essay Theory of Literary History , written in English, in 1936 , which already reveals the core of his later theoretical work. This work is also noteworthy because it introduced the theories of Russian formalism and the phenomenological approach of the Pole Roman Ingarden into the English-language literary discourse for the first time.

Since there was no professorship in sight in Prague, Wellek moved to London in 1935 . Until 1939 he taught Czech language and literature at the Slavic Institute of the University of London . In addition, on behalf of the Czechoslovak Ministry of Education, he gave six public lectures a year on the culture of his homeland. With the invasion of the Wehrmacht in Prague in March 1939 and the end of the Czechoslovak state, Wellek not only lost this source of income, but also saw his return to the " Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia " now ruled by National Socialist Germany prevented. An alternative opened up to him when he was offered a year-long teaching position at the University of Iowa . In August 1939 he and his wife moved to the USA; he was to stay there until his death. In 1946 the Welleks became American citizens.

The Department of English Literature at the University of Iowa, led by Norman Foerster , was at the time one of the main theaters of a dispute in American literary studies about the theoretical direction of literary studies. Wellek took the side of Foerster and the New Humanists , who, compared to the historical text work that had prevailed since the 19th century, strived for a more theoretical and interpretative orientation in English philology . In his subsequent works, Wellek did not tie in with the works of the New Humanists, but with European schools of thought.

In 1946 he accepted a professorship at Yale University , where he taught until his resignation in 1972. In 1958 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In the same year he was accepted as a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences . Since 1960 he has been a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW) and since 1969 a member of the American Philosophical Society . In 1973 he became a corresponding member of the British Academy .

Wellek's work Theory of Literature , co-authored with Austin Warren in 1949 , and to this day one of the most authoritative works of its kind, is shaped by the premises of European formalism, especially the Russian and Prague schools, but also forged a bridge to the related New Criticism , which established as the most influential theory school in Great Britain and the USA at the time. In the next few decades he mainly worked on a monumental eight-volume history of literary criticism ( A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950 (1955–1992)). When New Criticism came under increasing criticism, especially from post-structuralism , in the 1970s , Wellek was one of his most eloquent defenders.

After the death of his wife Olga in 1967, he married the Russian professor Nonna Dolodarenko Shaw . He published well into old age; he dictated the last two volumes of the History of Modern Criticism from the bedside.

Publications (selection)

  • Immanuel Kant in England: 1793-1838 (1931)
  • The Rise of English Literary History (1941)
  • Theory of Literature (1942 and 1949, with Austin Warren )
    • Theory of literature. Frankfurt am Main / Berlin / Vienna 1963 (= Ullstein book. Volume 420-421)
  • A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950 (8 volumes, 1955–1992)
  • Essays on Czech Literature (1963)
  • Confrontations: Studies in the Intellectual and Literary Relations between Germany, England, and the United States during the Nineteenth Century (1965)
  • The Literary Theory and Aesthetics of the Prague School (1969)
  • Discriminations: Further Concepts of Criticism (1970)
  • Four Critics: Croce, Valéry, Lukács, and Ingarden (1981)

Secondary literature

  • Martin Bucco: René Wellek . Twayne, Boston 1981, ISBN 0805773398 (= Twayne's United States Authors Series 410).
  • Roman R Landau: The authenticity of literature: conception and reception of Wellek's literary model . Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main and New York 1988, ISBN 3820402845 .
  • Sarah Lawall: René Wellek and Modern Literary Criticism . In: Comparative Literature 40: 1, 1988, pp. 3-24.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ René Wellek obituary in the 1996 yearbook of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (PDF file).
  2. ↑ KNAW Past Members: René Wellek. Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, accessed January 31, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Member History: René Wellek. American Philosophical Society, accessed January 31, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Wellek, René
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czech-American literary scholar
DATE OF BIRTH August 22, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH November 10, 1995
Place of death Hamden (Connecticut)