René Wellek

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

Wellek is primarily known for co-authored with Austin Warren work Theory of Literature (1949 ), one of the most influential works of its kind in the 20th century. This manifesto for a fixed set of methods of literary studies is no literary theory "a school " but took on many pulses text-oriented approaches such as the European structuralism, the Russian formalism and the New Criticism.

Life

René Wellek was born on 22 August 1903 as the eldest son of a bourgeois family in Vienna. His younger brother Albert Wellek (1904-1972) was to become one of the founders of modern psychology of music. Wellek mother Gabriele, born of Zelewsky, daughter of a West Prussian aristocrat of Polish origin and a Swiss mother, left her three children partake in a Lutheran embossed education. His father Bronislaw Wellek was a Czech lawyer, while employed at the court of Vienna, but still an ardent Czech nationalist was. Among other things, he gave the Austrian Prime Minister, Baron von Beck Czech lessons. Wellek first attended high school in Waehring. After the end of World War I and the collapse of Austria -Hungary, the family moved to Prague, the capital of the newly formed Czechoslovakia. The enthusiasm for the first Czech national state and especially the admiration of the nation's founder, Tomáš Masaryk impressed Wellek political awareness sustainable.

After high school he enrolled in 1922 at the Charles University. He attended mainly lectures on German and English literature and received his doctorate in 1926 with a thesis on the relationship Thomas Carlyle to romance. After a brief period of study at Oxford, he went in 1927 in the United States and conducted research first at Princeton University. In 1928, he taught German at Smith College, 1929-1930 turn in Princeton. After his return to Prague he habilitated in 1931 with the writing of Immanuel Kant in England: 1793-1838, a study of Kant reception of the English Romantics. In 1932 he married primary school teacher Olga Brodská.

In the following years Wellek taught as a private English language and literature. He also wrote numerous articles for various publications humanities. Reaching consequences for Wellek understanding of literature was his close contact with the Prague Linguistic Circle to Roman Jakobson, whose magazine Slovo a slovesnost he regularly contributed reviews and literary articles. The sixth volume of the Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague in 1936 he contributed the essay written in English, Theory of Literary History in, which is already producing the core of his later theoretical work. This work is also notable because she was first to introduce the theories of Russian formalism and the phenomenological approach of Poland Roman Ingarden in the English-language literature discourse.

As in Prague was no professor in sight, moved Wellek 1935 to London. Until 1939, he taught at the Slavic Institute of the University of London Czech language and literature. In addition, he held on behalf of the Czechoslovak Ministry of Education annually six public lectures about the culture of his homeland. With the invasion of the army in Prague in March 1939 and the end of the Czechoslovak state Wellek not only lost this source of revenue but also saw its return to the now dominated by Nazi Germany " Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia " prevented. An alternative opened up to him when he was offered a one-year teaching position at the American Province University University of Iowa. In August 1939 he moved with his wife to the USA; he was to remain until his death there. In 1946, the Wellek American citizens.

Led by Norman Foerster Department of English Literature at the University of Iowa at the time was one of the main venues a run in American Literature dispute over the theoretical orientation of the literature. Wellek containing proposals on the page Foerster and the New Humanists, a stronger theoretical and interpretative orientation of English Philology strove against the prevailing since the 19th century historical text work. Wellek but not followed up on in his subsequent work on the works of the New Humanists, but to European schools of thought.

In 1946 he accepted a professorship at Yale University, where he taught until his retirement in 1972. His 1949 collaboration with Austin Warren authored work theory of literature, until today one of the key works of its kind, is of the premises of the European Formalism, marked in particular by the Russian and Prague schools, but suggested there is also a bridge to the like-minded New Criticism, which established at that time in the UK and the U.S. as the most influential theory school. In the next few decades he worked primarily on a monumental eight-volume history of literary criticism ( A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950 ( 1955-1992 ) ). As under increasing criticism came in the 1970s, the New Criticism in particular on the part of post-structuralism, Wellek was one of his most eloquent defenders.

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

Works (selection)

• Immanuel Kant in England: 1793-1838 (1931 )
• The Rise of English Literary History (1941 )
• Theory of Literature (1949, with Austin Warren )
• A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950 (8 volumes, 1955-1992 )
• Essays on Czech Literature ( 1963)
• The Literary Theory and Aesthetics of the Prague School ( 1969)
• Four Critics: Croce, Valéry, Lukács, and Ingarden (1981 )