| IN MEMORIAM
ROBERT HENRY WILSON
Robert Henry "Bob" Wilson, longtime professor
and subsequently professor emeritus of English at The University
of Texas at Austin, died January 15, 1998. Bob was born April
5, 1909. He and his wife, Lucille, had one daughter, now Dr. Edith
Wilson Miles of Bethesda, Maryland. He attended Kenyon College
in Ohio for a year. Then he went to Stanford University where
he became a member of Phi Beta Kappa and earned a BA in 1928 and
an MA in 1930. He received a PhD in English at the University
of Chicago in 1932, having studied under the well-known medievalists
John Matthews Manley and Edith Rickert. He wrote his dissertation,
Characterization in Malory: A Comparison with the Sources,
on Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur. It was published by the
University of Chicago Libraries in a photographic facsimile edition
of 150 copies and a photoduplicated clothbound Folcroft Library
edition in 1970.
In addition to teaching at The University
of Texas, Bob taught at Howard College, Southwest Texas State
University, Southwestern University, and Louisiana State University.
He served the English department at UT Austin as an instructor
from 1934 to 1938, and rejoined the department as an assistant
professor in 1947, where he taught full time until his retirement
in 1978. He became a full professor in 1962. He served the department
efficiently and effectively in various capacities, among them
graduate adviser from 1974 to 1976, and chair of the PhD Qualifying
Committee in 1978. He taught a full range of undergraduate and
graduate courses in Middle English literature (Chaucer, Middle
English survey, Malory), as well as composition and literature
survey courses to freshmen and sophomores. He also liked to offer
a course of his devising in English and American satire. He was
known as a scrupulously fair and conscientious teacher who was
always willing to take time with students.
Aside from his dissertation, Professor Wilson
s scholarship never took the form of a book, but his well-known
articles, particularly on Malory, would fill more than one book.
He published in all the leading literature journals of his day:
PMLA (1940, 1943), Philological Quarterly (1930),
Studies in Philology (1931), Modern Philology (1939),
JEGP (1943), Modern Language Notes (1948), Notes
& Queries (1970), and Medievalia et Humanistica
(1978), as well as a series of essays for Texas Studies in
English. He worked diligently for several years on the long
section on Malory and Caxton in the Manual of Writings in Middle
English, Albert Hartung general editor, the project reaching
fruition in 1975 with the publication of Volume III.
Professor Wilson's scholarship on Malory well
reflects his scholarly and personal character. He was willing
to take endless pains researching and writing on carefully selected
significant topics. The result was a series of articles that are
absolutely basic to Malory studies. A measure of their worth is
the fact that the two most influential interpreters of Malory
in mid-century, whose views of the nature and structure of Morte
Darthur were diametrically opposed, both praised Bob s work
highly. The great French and English scholar of Arthurian studies,
Eugene Vinaver, writing of Professor Wilson s work in 1952, speaks
of his grasp of detail, and his ability to organize his material
in a coherent and convincing way, which had led to his important
and distinguished position in the field of Malory studies. In
the same year, Robert M. Lumiansky, Vinaver s prominent American
opponent in Malory interpretation, wrote that Wilson s thoroughly
sound series of articles on the sources and evolution of the
Morte Darthur furnish the most illuminating and convincing
commentary on the book now available in print.
Kurth Sprague, who earned his PhD in English
at the University under Wilson s direction and became a professor
of American studies here, comments that he knew Bob Wilson for
almost 30 years, first as a teacher; then as adviser and dissertation
committee member when I was a graduate student; and then afterward
as a colleague and friend. Of Bob as teacher, he comments on
his precise and meticulous presentation and his exacting standards.
When a student responded less than intelligently on the subject
at hand, he adds, his smile could freeze the student s young
blood. Of Wilson s essays he writes of their being unfettered
by jargon, shorn of excess verbiage, each a jewel of scholarship
. . . and expressed with magisterial succinctness. He recalls
Vinaver s visits to Austin in the 1970 s when Bob first met
this grand old man of Arthurian studies for the first time. The
two éminences grises, Sprague reports, exchanged
respectful civilities, and shook their heads together over
excesses of the scholars sometimes referred to as the Lumiansky
gang. Both men were scholarly conservatives, even though Wilson
s discoveries indicated that Lumiansky s more liberal interpretation
of Malory had a point.
<signed>
Larry R. Faulkner, President
The University of Texas at Austin
<signed>
John R. Durbin, Secretary
The General Faculty
This memorial resolution was prepared by a
special committee consisting of Professors James Wimsatt (chair),
James Garrison, and Thomas Cable.
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