Leo Spitzer
Born(1887-02-07)7 February 1887
Vienna, Austria-Hungary
Died16 September 1960(1960-09-16) (aged 73)
Forte dei Marmi, Italy
Alma materWilhelm Meyer-Lübke
Occupation(s)Literary critic, philologist
InstitutionsUniversity of Cologne
Istanbul University
Johns Hopkins University
Notable studentsHans Marchand[1]

Leo Spitzer (German: [ˈʃpɪtsɐ]; 7 February 1887 – 16 September 1960) was an Austrian Romanist and Hispanist, philologist, and an influential and prolific literary critic. He was known for his emphasis on stylistics. Along with Erich Auerbach, Spitzer is widely recognized as one of the foundational figures of comparative literature.[2][3][4][5]

Biography

Spitzer was a doctoral student of Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke, receiving his doctorate in 1910. He was a professor at the University of Marburg in 1925, at the University of Cologne in 1930. In 1933 he was dismissed because of his Jewish background and left Nazi Germany, moving to Istanbul; his position was taken up by literary scholar and philologist Ernst Robert Curtius.[6] In Istanbul, Spitzer taught at the Istanbul University for three years "as the first professor of Latin languages" and "as director of the School of Foreign Languages."[6] From there he went to Johns Hopkins University in 1936 (succeeding the chair in Romance philology left vacant with the death of David S. Blondheim in 1934), where he remained for the rest of his life.

Legacy

According to René Wellek and Austin Warren:

Leo Spitzer early applied [parallelism of linguistic traits and content-elements] by investigating the recurrence of such motifs as blood and wounds in the writings of Henri Barbusse [...]. Later, Spitzer has tried to establish the connexion between recurrent stylistic traits and the psychology of the author, e.g. he connected the repetitive style of Péguy with his Bergsonism, and the style of Jules Romains with his Unanimism.[7]

Selected works

References

  1. ^ Auroux, Sylvain; Koerner, E. F. K.; Niederehe, Hans-Josef; Versteegh, Kees (2008-07-14). History of the Language Sciences / Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaften / Histoire des sciences du langage. 3. Teilband. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-019982-6.
  2. ^ Apter, Emily (2003). "Global Translatio: The "Invention" of Comparative Literature, Istanbul, 1933". Critical Inquiry. 29 (2): 253–281. doi:10.1086/374027. ISSN 0093-1896. JSTOR 10.1086/374027. S2CID 161816827. As many have pointed out, the foundational figures of comparative literature—Leo Spitzer, Erich Auerbach—came as exiles and emigres from war-torn Europe with a shared suspicion of nationalism.
  3. ^ Mufti, Aamir R. (1998-10-01). "Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture". Critical Inquiry. 25 (1): 104. doi:10.1086/448910. ISSN 0093-1896. S2CID 145333748. In a brief but remarkable essay on the ethos of comparative literary scholarship in the postwar U.S., Emily Apter has argued that the discipline Auerbach, Curtius, Leo Spitzer, and others founded (or reformulated) on their arrival in the U.S. was structured in fundamental ways around the experience of exile and displacement.
  4. ^ Haen, Theo d' (2009). Literature for Europe?. Rodopi. p. 54. ISBN 978-90-420-2716-9. We should remember that comparative literature in the United States was also largely started by immigrants – the refugees who fled Nazi Germany (principal among them Auerbach, Spitzer, Poggolio and Wellek).
  5. ^ Hutchinson, Ben (2018). Comparative Literature: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. p. 78. ISBN 978-0-19-880727-8. In the footsteps of pioneering figures such as Spitzer and Auerbach, the discipline of comparative literature began gathering pace in the 1950s largely as a transatlantic affair.
  6. ^ a b Apter, Emily (2003). "Global Translatio: The "Invention" of Comparative Literature, Istanbul, 1933". Critical Inquiry. 29 (2): 260–261. doi:10.1086/374027. ISSN 0093-1896. JSTOR 10.1086/374027. S2CID 161816827.
  7. ^ Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature, 3rd edition (Penguin, 1963), pp.182-83.
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