René Wellek
René Wellek was an influential literary scholar born in Vienna, Austria, who made significant contributions to literary criticism and theory throughout the 20th century. Raised in a culturally rich environment, he pursued studies in various languages and literature, eventually focusing on German philology at Charles University in Prague. Wellek's academic journey included a fellowship at Princeton and teaching positions at institutions like Yale and Smith College, where he developed a foundational understanding of literary history and criticism. His notable works include "Theory of Literature," co-authored with Austin Warren, and "The Rise of English Literary History," which highlighted the importance of the text itself over contextual influences.
Wellek is often associated with the New Criticism movement, although he himself downplayed this connection. Throughout his career, he directed numerous dissertations and published extensively, with over 400 works to his name, including essays, translations, and anthologies. His leadership in establishing comparative literature programs at Yale and his roles in various academic committees underscore his lasting impact on the field. Wellek's commitment to literary scholarship continued even after his retirement, with visiting professorships at prestigious universities. His legacy remains significant in the study of literature and literary criticism.
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Subject Terms
René Wellek
Literary Critic
- Born: August 22, 1903
- Birthplace: Vienna, Austria
- Died: November 10, 1995
- Place of death: Hamden, Connecticut
Biography
René Wellek was born in Vienna, Austria, to Bronislav, a Czech nationalist and lawyer, and Gabriele, a multilingual Italian. Wellek’s education, both formal and informal, was enormously rich, and as a youth he studied German, Greek, Latin, and English in addition to Czech and Italian. During the establishment of Czechoslovakia, the family moved to Prague, which was a hub of European culture. Wellek entered Charles University in Prague to study German philology; he then published his first article, a critique of a Czech translation of Romeo and Juliet.
During his university education, he learned to combine the rigorous and thorough research of the German school, and the clarity and suavity of the English writers of the era. His doctoral thesis was on English poet Thomas Carlyle’s Romanticism, and the degree was awarded in 1926. In 1927, Wellek received a fellowship to Princeton and began teaching German there and at Smith College. He returned to Prague in 1929, but then traveled to England, where he worked on Coleridge, Kant, and the Middle English Pearl Poet, on whom he published his classic essay in 1933. Back at Charles University in 1930, Wellek joined the Prague Linguistic Circle of scholars and critics. He published his study of Kant in 1931 and married schoolteacher Olga Brodská, with whom he had one son in 1932.
Without a secure job in Prague, Wellek moved to London to teach in the School of Slavonic Studies at the University of London (1935-1939). His “Theory of Literary History” of 1936 laid the groundwork for his later development of literary criticism, which privileged the work itself over any contextual influences such as historical setting or author’s biography. When Hitler took Prague in 1939, Wellek’s funding was cut, and he moved his family to Iowa City, then New Haven, Conneticut, where he taught at Yale. At Yale he prepared the manuscript of his The Rise of English Literary History (1941), and at the University of Iowa he became entangled in sharp debates between literary historicists and pure critics, like himself. During World War II, he directed the training of interpreters for the Army. Afterward, Wellek received a Rockefeller Foundation grant to work at Harvard on his monograph, Theory of Literature, published in 1949 with Austin Warren, whom he had befriended at Iowa.
Wellek’s work on literary theory and criticism is often credited with spawning, or at least supporting, New Criticism, a role that he denied. Yale hired the newly naturalized Wellek in 1946 to direct and build its program of comparative literature. He became Sterling Professor in 1952 and chair of the department in 1960, and he continued to teach until his retirement in 1972. In 1967, his wife died and he married Nonna Dolodarenko Shaw, a professor of Russian literature at the University of Pittsburgh.
Wellek was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1951-1952, 1957, and 1966- 1967, became a Fulbright Scholar in West Germany in 1969, and in 1972-1973 became a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He oversaw fifty dissertations and produced 433 works that included essays, translations, and monographs. He was founder of the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces and general editor of the 208-volume English Literary Criticism of the Eighteenth Century. After retiring, he was a visiting professor at, among other schools, Princeton (1973), Indiana University (1974), and the University of Washington (1979).