Werner Paul Friederich: Christopher Columbus of American Comparatism
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Comparative Critical Studies 7.2-3 (2010): 179-191. Edinburgh University Press. DOI10.3366/ccs.2010.0004, ISSN1744-1854. Copyright British Comparative Literature Association
Werner Paul Friederich[*]: ‘Christopher Columbus of
American Comparatism’
Diane R. Leonard
Though Werner Paul Friederich was a man of small stature, he cast a long shadow. He was born in 1905 in Thun, Switzerland, where the river Aare flows out of the Lake of Thun in the Bernese Alps, a few miles south of the city of Bern. He passed away in 1993 in Chapel Hill, in the southeastern US, where he had spent his entire career at the University of North Carolina. During the long trajectory of those 88 years, he laid the groundwork for Comparative Literature in the United States – so much so that he was hailed in Paris as ‘le Christoph Colomb du comparatisme américain’.[1]
Friederich studied at the University of Bern, then went to the Sorbonne. Though we know little about his time at the Sorbonne, it is clear his studies there shaped his career as a comparatist. At its Institut de littérature comparée, he encountered such well-known figures in the field of French comparatism as Fernand Baldensperger, Jean-Marie Carré, and Paul Van Tieghem. Baldensperger had begun teaching Comparative Literature there in 1910;[2] he and Paul Hazard founded the first comparatist journal, the Revue de littérature comparée, in 1921, and in 1931 Van Tieghem published the first French manual, La Littérature comparée. Carré was Baldensperger’s successor at both the Sorbonne and theRevue de littérature comparée (1935–1955). Friederich later wrote of Baldensperger’s ‘felicitous ability to inspire men and universities all over Europe with his own scholarly credo, so that the comparatists of Switzerland, Holland, and Scandinavia, of Hungary, Poland, and Rumania soon came to look upon the Baldensperger–Hazard–Van Tieghem team of the Institut de littérature comparée at the Sorbonne as the very soul of their branch of learning’.[3] To a large extent, Friederich himself would follow in the footsteps of these scholars as he went about establishing comparative studies on a firm basis in North America.
After his stay at the Sorbonne, Friederich went to the United States to continue his studies at Harvard University, where he took an M.A. in American literature, followed by a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (1932). In 1935 he began teaching at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a lecturer in German. He would spend the rest of his career there, teaching both German and Comparative Literature. UNC’s Curriculum of Comparative Literature had been established in 1917, the third oldest such programme in the United States, but it was under Friederich’s influence that it rose to prominence. He contributed the first genuinely comparative courses to the Curriculum: one on the international impact of French Classicism and Enlightenment and one on Anglo-German Pre-Romanticism. After a sabbatical year in 1950 in Seville and Florence, he added two more surveys: a course on the foreign echoes of the Italian Renaissance and one on the Spanish Golden Age, the whole four-course cycle beginning with Dante and ending with Goethe.[4] He was made William Rand Kenan Professor of German and Comparative Literature and served as Chair of the Curriculum for a number of years, adding joint faculty and increasing the size of its graduate student body. When he retired in 1970 he left behind him a thriving graduate programme in Comparative Literature, one of the most recognized in the nation.
The MLA Comparative Literature Section
At the same time that he was establishing Comparative Literature at Chapel Hill, Friederich began to implement an ambitious plan to launch the new field nationally. In 1945 he devised a three-part programme, which he carried out systematically and successfully: the establishment of a national organization; the founding of a Comparative Literature journal; and the launching of a publication in which discussion of practical aspects of the field could be ongoing. As a first step, he began to organize the growing number of scholars interested in Comparative Literature. He had been preceded in this undertaking by Arthur Christy of Columbia University, who published a Comparative Literature Newsletter from 1942 to 1946 under the auspices of the National Council of Teachers of English. After 1946, Friederich took over this endeavour. In the course of a few years, through scores of mimeographed Newsletters he typed himself and distributed at his own expense all over the US and Canada, he succeeded in gathering about 350 members interested in the new field. This interest group was to prove crucial to his efforts to establish Comparative Literature in the MLA. Though the Modern Language Association of America had admitted seven international discussion groups, by the end of the Second World War it still had no comprehensive Comparative Literature Section to hold those groups together. In 1947, with the support of those he had gathered through his Newsletters, Friederich succeeded in persuading the MLA to establish a Comparative Literature Section, giving the international discussion groups a united purpose and strength. David Malone wrote that ‘Friederich led Comparative Literature within less than a decade from virtual oblivion to the beginnings of its present prominence in American higher education’.[5]
The Comparative Literature Journal in Oregon
The second step of Friederich’s programme was the journal. When Chandler Beall of the University of Oregon contacted him about his plans to establish a Comparative Literature journal in the US, the organization behind Friederich’s Newsletters supported him, and the presence of the MLA Comparative Literature Section made it possible for Beall to start publishing his Comparative Literature quarterly in Oregon in 1949, with Friederich himself serving as co-founder and associate editor. Friederich described the international programme of the new publication, the first journal of comparative studies in the United States:
It will promote articles […] reflecting the vast international currents of ancient and modern literature, and it will endeavor to supplement such articles by occasional syntheses of current investigations of certain problems, and by accurate bibliographies of comparative studies. The Editors also hope that the cause of international understanding may be furthered by this new journal, for they not only intend to encourage the study of literary interdependence across political and linguistic barriers and to work against short-sighted and artificial restrictions in the interpretation of great men and great currents, but they are also anxious to urge scholars, especially European and Ibero-American, to participate in their new undertaking.[6]
Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature
Friederich had aspired for the new journal to be an American version of La Revue de littérature comparée in Paris, on whose editorial board he served. However, these plans did not materialize, as he explained in an unpublished memoir:
Two hopes of mine went awry with the founding of the Comparative Literature journal in Oregon: first, I had hoped that our Editorial Board would frequently rotate its membership so as to attract ever-new scholars and viewpoints to our new undertaking; and second, that our American journal would emulate the Revue de littérature comparée in Paris by dwelling not only on strictly scholarly articles but, almost as importantly, also on brief discussions about the scope, the methods, the staff etc. of our new undertakings. Both these possibilities […] were justifiably vetoed by Chandler Beall and so, in 1952, I decided to take care of this obvious need by starting the Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature […]. To assure the success of the Yearbook, I asked Horst Frenz from Indiana University, who was very active in the organisation of teachers of foreign masterpieces in English translation, to become Associate Editor. Subsequently Ulrich Weisstein, also from Indiana, included annual ‘addenda et corrigenda’ to the big Bibliography […]. After my own retirement, the editorship of the Yearbook passed entirely into the hands of the very active group of Indiana comparatists.[7]
The first issue of the Yearbook in 1952 set the standard for those to follow. It included essays by such scholars as Jean-Marie Carré, Henri Peyre, and Harry Levin, along with ‘short appreciative articles’ on Louis Betz, George Woodberry, Paul Van Tieghem and Fernand Baldensperger (the latter by Werner Friederich). Featured also were descriptions of Comparative Literature graduate programmes at several universities: Columbia, Harvard, Dartmouth, Chapel Hill, Southern California, Wisconsin, Yale, Indiana, and the Sorbonne. Finally, there were reviews of recent translations – Homer, Sophocles, Aristotle, Cervantes, Molière, Rousseau, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Ibsen and Hauptmann – along with an annual supplement to the Baldensperger-Friederich Bibliography of Comparative Literature. Friederich’s preface to the first issue set forth his three-step programme, and then articulated his aims for the Yearbook’s ensuing numbers:
The present Yearbook […] opens its pages to all comparatists who wish to discuss such problems as the scope and the task of Comparative Literature, the teaching of Great Books courses, the difficulties encountered in achieving interdepartmental collaboration or in choosing the most suitable texts or the best available translations, the delineation (if any) between Comparative, General, and World Literature, the administrative and technical problems involved in setting up the necessary curricula for an international study of literature, and so forth. […] [T]he publication of this Yearbook indicates that our task of redefining our creed and of consolidating and improving our position in the various universities and colleges will never really come to an end. It is hoped that in these constant efforts the Yearbook may serve as a clearinghouse, a rallying point, a source of information and strength.[8]
Succeeding issues included articles by such comparatists as Baldensperger, Weisstein, Wellek, Peyre, Austen Warren, David Malone, Charles Dédéyan, Robert Escarpit, Haskell Block, Albert Guérard, and Victor Erlich. They also featured short appreciative essays on figures such as Carré, Hazard, Wellek, Guérard, Irving Babbitt, Ernst Robert Curtius, Benedetto Croce, Marcel Bataillon, G. N. Orsini, and W. A. P. Smit. The eighth issue was the last number of the Yearbook to appear under Friederich’s editorship. Issue IX, from 1960, was co-edited by Horst Frenz at Indiana and Karl-Ludwig Selig at North Carolina, and included an article on Werner Friederich by Oskar Seidlin. Friederich was passing the reins to the comparatists at Indiana, having carried out all three steps of his programme.
The Baldensperger-Friederich Bibliography of
Comparative Literature
Ever since his studies in Europe, Friederich’s contacts with the Sorbonne had remained particularly fruitful. Impressed by what he considered to be the indubitable French leadership in the field, he hoped to correlate his efforts with theirs. So in discussions with Baldensperger in Paris in 1948, he agreed to complete and publish his bibliography of Comparative Literature.[9] In 1900, Louis-Paul Betz had published the first such bibliography, La littérature comparée, essai bibliographique, a revision of which Baldensperger had brought out in 1904. He had continued to collect additional materials for a third edition, for which he worked out an entirely new system of logical classification; however, not being able to carry through his plans, he arranged to bequeath his collection of material to Harvard.[10] Friederich has given an account of his own role in what followed:
Discouraged by the enormity of his undertaking, Baldensperger had left his approximately 15,000 fiches to Widener Library at Harvard and, after five years of ceaseless accumulation of titles, my wife Molly and I finally finished the Bibliography of about 33,000 items. […] With the big Bibliography incorporated in our newly established UNC Studies in Comparative Literature, I was able to return to Mr. Baldensperger $2,000 of the money he had planned for the publication of his last work.[11]
The 1950 Baldensperger-Friederich Bibliography of Comparative Literature was divided into four sections: I. ‘Generalities, Intermediaries, Thematology, and Literary Genres’; II. ‘The Orient, Antiquity (Greece, Rome), Judaism, early Christianity, Mohammedanism and their Contributions’; III. ‘Aspects of Western Culture: Modern Christianity, Literary Currents, International Literary Relations, Collective Influences Upon Continents, Nations and Individuals’; IV. ‘The Modern World’, classified into Celtic, Provençal, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and Belgian, French, English, Swiss, German, North and South American, Scandinavian, and East European contributions. The Bibliography was supplemented in ensuing years by addenda published in the Yearbook. René Wellek praised Friederich’s accomplishment in a review: ‘This is not only more than double the number of M. Baldensperger’s collections; it also represents a very considerable labor of revision and checking, since M. Baldensperger’s files at Harvard University Library were, when I used them in 1945, very far from ready for printing. […] Mr. Friederich can be proud of his achievement. He has given all students of comparative literature and actually all students of literature an invaluable, indispensable tool, an up-to-date, very full, and generally accurate survey of all scholarship which can be called comparative literature.’[12]
In order to publish the Bibliography, Friederich started a monograph series, University of North Carolina Studies in Comparative Literature, for which he served as editor from 1950 until 1959. In all, 68 volumes of comparatist studies were published in this series before it ceased to appear in the 1980s. Friederich later wrote that the Studies ‘were not only used by noted scholars like Helmut Hatzfeld, Lawrence Marsden Price, and Philip Shelley, but were meant above all to encourage young comparatists to try their wings’.[13] In 1950 also, Friederich published Dante’s Fame Abroad (1350–1850): The Influence of Dante Alighieri on the Poets and Scholars of Spain, France, England, Germany, Switzerland and the United States. A Survey of the Present State of Scholarship. As its title indicates, this 583-page comparative study surveys 500 years of publications on Dante in six countries, including translations, influences on foreign writers, and critical studies written by foreigners. Helmut Hatzfeld referred to it as ‘a necessarily hybrid work which hovers between a critical reader on Dante scholarship outside Italy and a reference book for Dante translations, non-Italian poetry influenced by Dante, and Dante criticism’.[14] It, too, appeared as a volume of the UNC Studies in Comparative Literature.
Outline of Comparative Literature
In 1954 Friederich brought out his Outline of Comparative Literature from Dante Alighieri to Eugene O’Neill, with the collaboration of David Henry Malone.[15] Its 451 pages, listing roughly 3000 names, were divided into six sections: I. The Renaissance; II. The Baroque; III. Classicism and Enlightenment; IV. Pre-Romanticism; V. Romanticism; VI. Realism-Symbolism. One reviewer wrote: ‘we have here no less than the floor plan, the broad foundation of a truly monumental work, a possibly cooperative history of comparative literature of Balzacian proportions – a “Comédie Littéraire” of the Western World.’[16] In an opening statement, the authors noted that the only rival of their Outline was Paul Van Tieghem’s 1946 volume, Histoire littéraire de l’Europe et de l’Amérique de la Renaissance à nos jours, but that even Van Tieghem’s work