IN MEMORIAM
DAVID J. DELAURA
“With regard to excellence, it is not enough to know,
but we must try to have and use it.” Aristotle’s
famous and stringent words in the Nichomachean Ethics come
decisively to mind as a tribute to David J. DeLaura. His life
was exemplary of what it means both to know excellence and to
use it. David’s dedication to all the human excellences
was at once astonishing and inspiring. Moreover, he displayed
this dedication as much in his ebullient good humor as in his
subtle writing, as much in the immense delight he took in other
people as in his acute perceptions about the texts he taught,
and as much in his indefatigable curiosity about the world around
him as in the remarkable moral energy he brought to the many
phases of his professional life. David used his excellence in
pursuit of his own goals, and he used it, marvelously, to the
advantage of the innumerable people whose lives he so dramatically
influenced. David was born in Worcester, Massachusetts on November 19, 1930,
the son of Louis and Helen DeLaura, a family with roots in the
community of Portuguese immigrants who settled in the New England
area. He died suddenly in Lisbon, in the country of his forebears,
on April 9, 2005. Somber though it is, David would have appreciated
this symmetry.
David DeLaura belonged to a generation of professors who
initiated profound changes in American university life beginning
in the early nineteen-sixties. Having taken his A.B. (1955) and
his M.A. (1958) at Boston College, he went on to do his doctoral
studies at the University of Wisconsin, one of the crucial sites
of the impending academic transformation. He received his Ph.D.
in English in 1960. From Madison he came directly to Austin to
take up the position of instructor in English at the University.
A sign of David’s phenomenal success is indicated by the
fact that he was a full professor by 1968. His colleagues at
the University, like his colleagues in the profession at large,
realized from a very early stage that David, as a teacher, a
scholar, and a leader, was doing extraordinary work. In less
than a decade, David had become a key figure among the literary
scholars of his generation as well as a key figure in helping
to implement much needed institutional reforms at The University
of Texas. Many faculty will recall the powerful leadership that
David exercised in his department and through his service on
the Faculty Senate and the University Council, as well as in
his positions on both presidential and vice presidential search
committees. He was a voice of steady persuasion and unflinching
courage as the University community struggled, often tumultuously,
to create more openness, more inclusiveness, and more defined
responsibility in its governing procedures and in its academic
life.
Perhaps the greatest example of the esteem in which David
was held by his colleagues occurred when he was asked to represent
the faculty in their virtually unanimous opposition to the Regents’ high-handed
determination to dismember the College of Arts and Sciences.
Despite David’s gallant efforts, the faculty lost this
battle, but the creation of the College of Liberal Arts some
twenty or so years later was a tacit validation of the faculty’s
position. A more immediate success was the establishment of a
departmental executive committee, a governing body that replaced
the old-style, autocratic budget committee. David was at the
center of the movement that produced this change, which became
a model for other departments, and he used his growing academic
prestige as leverage in its cause. Moreover, David’s commitment
to the excellence of the University, while extending to some
of the most urgent issues of the day, also included his ready
shouldering of the most basic tasks of the profession. He chaired
the Freshman English Committee, served on multiple recruitment
committees, directed a host of honors theses, and every year
gave what became a legendary talk to incoming graduate students
on the topic of understanding “the pattern of their conversion
to English studies.” David began his scholarly career just as a vital new appreciation
of interdisciplinary Victorian scholarship in Anglo-American
historical research and literary criticism had begun. David caught
the spirit of this emergent inquiry, knew the questions to ask,
trained his always penetrating eye on the materials coming to
light, and quickly became a preeminent force in the field. Indeed,
a fair case could be made, given the enormous influence of his
published work, the stimulus he provided to other scholars through
a stream of correspondence, professional meetings, and ever-expanding
consultations with influential boards, presses, and foundations,
that David was the dominant shaper of Victorian studies in his
time. The centerpiece of his scholarly work is Hebrew and Hellene
in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater (1969).
Taking as his focus the pervasive conflict between moral and
aesthetic consciousness in the nineteenth century, David used
the tangled issues articulated in the major books of all three
figures to open up a supremely illuminating account of how
the “religious problems of the Victorian period centrally
affected [its] evolving humanistic syntheses.” The book,
as scholars have always recognized, is much more than a study
of three writers. David essentially re-wrote the intellectual
history of the period by identifying a prolonged, complicated,
contentious, and often disguised conversation going on among “the
Victorian sages,” who were constantly shaping and re-shaping
their texts in sinuous debate with one another. The method
of the book is nearly as important as its subject. Through
application of what one reviewer called David’s extraordinary “textological
ear,” which enabled him to discover a whole network of
verbal echoes, reprises, and resistances in the works he probed,
modern scholars could for the first time read the Victorian
texts as though they were present at the original conversation.
Moreover, David applied both this method and his richly detailed
knowledge of a host of Victorian writers to map, lucidly and
incisively, a long obscured set of nineteenth-century literary
sub-cultures that exerted crucial influence at pivotal moments
in the period’s cultural history. Two salient examples
are “The Poetry of Thought” (1976) and “The
Context of Browning’s Painter Poems: Aesthetics, Polemics,
Historics” (1980). David authored some of the most important critical essays ever
written on Victorian literature and cultural history. Remarkably,
while still an assistant professor, David was awarded the first
annual William R. Parker prize for the year’s outstanding
contribution to the PMLA, the premier journal in the
field of literary studies. This was his 1964 study of “Arnold
and Carlyle.” Over the years there followed a succession
of groundbreaking articles and book-chapters including, “’The
Ache of Modernism’ in Hardy’s Later Novels” (1967), “Ishmael
as Prophet: Heroes and Hero-Worship and the Self-Expressive
Basis of Carlyle’s Art” (1969), and “Matthew
Arnold and the Nightmare of History” (1972). David began
to examine, later in his career, the connections between the
concept of Bildung in German Romanticism and Victorian
ideas of culture. He wrote prolifically on this subject as in “Heroic
Egotism and the Fortunes of Bildung in Victorian England” (1984),
all the while maintaining his elegant scholarship on the intellectual
and biographical contexts that shaped the themes, conflicts,
nuances, and even the vocabulary of nineteenth-century literature.
It is a great misfortune that David never collected his immensely
influential essays since they continue to be powerful and illuminating
resources. In 1974 David was appointed Avalon Foundation Professor in the
Humanities and Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
Friends, colleagues and administrators at The University of Texas
made a great effort to keep him in Austin. Though David struggled
with his difficult decision, he very much wanted new challenges.
David charged into his new position with his customary energy
and dedication. From 1985-1990, he served as chair of the English
department (and later as University Ombudsman). One of his colleagues
at Penn has said that “as department chair and Ombudsman,
his patience proved limitless, and his capacity to come to our
aid in times of need had no boundaries.” He retired from
Penn in 1999. Always a great teacher, David was awarded both the Mortarboard
Award for teaching and the Ira Abrams Award, the University of
Pennsylvania’s highest teaching prize. This public recognition
of David’s performance in the classroom mirrors the abiding
gratitude that hundreds of his students and dozens of his professional
colleagues have expressed in response to the generosity of his
guidance and support over the years. Professor Vicki Mahaffey,
who was both student and colleague, speaks for them: “David
was my undergraduate teacher at Texas when I was there; I have
known him since I was 19, and it was wonderful to have him as
a colleague at Penn. I loved and admired him.” Yet another
dimension of David’s buoyant collegiality, personal charm,
and warm humanity is reflected in the many accounts—often
by virtual strangers—of his communal and caring spirit.
In a typical reminiscence, Thierry Vourdon, a French school teacher
who met David at a 1979 conference on Walter Pater, writes: “I
just hope people will remember what a wonderful person he was.
... I happened to sit next to him for a dinner, and his kindness,
humour, and patience (towards a young French naive student so
delighted to be able to chat with a Professor) made an impression
that lasts to this day.” David’s memory is dearest, of course, to his beloved wife
of forty-four years, the former Ann Beloate, whom he married
in Austin, to his children, Michael, Catherine, and William in
whom he took such pride, and his grandchildren, Matthew and Caroline,
who were the delight of his last years. We at The University
of Texas can only extend our deepest sympathy to his family.
They knew him, as did his friends, colleagues, and students,
as someone who gave life to the present just as his brilliant
scholarship gave life to the past. What man could do more?
Frater, ave atque vale.
<signed>
Larry R. Faulkner, President
The University of Texas at Austin
<signed>
Sue Alexander Greninger, Secretary
The General Faculty
This memorial resolution was prepared by a special committee consisting of Professors
John P. Farrell (chair), Jerome Bump, and Betty Sue Flowers.
David J. DeLaura: Selected Publications
John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua, ed. David J. DeLaura (NY:
Norton Critical Editions, 1968).
Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater (Austin:
U of Texas P, 1969).
Matthew Arnold: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. David J. DeLaura
(Prentice-Hall, Twentieth Century Views, 1973).
Victorian Prose: A Guide to Research, ed. David J. DeLaura (NY: Modern
Language Association, 1973).
“The Place of the Classics in T. S. Eliot’s Christian Humanism,” Hereditas:
Seven Essays on the Modern Experience of the Classics, ed. Frederic
Will (Austin: U of Texas P, 1964), 153-97.
“Arnold and Carlyle,” PMLA79 (1964), 104-29.
“Matthew Arnold and the American ‘Literary Class’: Unpublished
Correspondence and Some Further Reasons,” Bulletin of the New York
Public Library 70 (1966), 229-50.
“‘The Ache of Modernism’ in Hardy’s Later Novels” ELH 34
(1967), 380-99.
“Ishmael as Prophet: Heroes and Hero-Worship and the Self-Expressive
Basis of Carlyle’s Art,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 11
(1969), 705-32.
“Matthew Arnold andthe Nightmare of History,” Victorian
Poetry, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer, Stratford-upon-Avon Series
#16 (London: Edward Arnold, 1972), 37-57.
“Some Victorian Experiments in Closure,” Studies in the Literary
Imagination8 (1975), 19-35.
“The Future of Poetry: A Context for Carlyle and Arnold,” Carlyle
and His Contemporaries: Essays in Honor of Charles Richard Sanders,
ed. John Clubbe (Durham: Duke U P, 1976), 148-80.
“The Poetry of Thought,” The Mind and Art of Victorian England,
ed. Josef L. Altholz (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1976), 35-57.
“The Allegory of Life: The Autobiographical Impulse in Victorian Prose,” Approaches
to Victorian Autobiography, ed. George P. Landow (Athens, Ohio: Ohio
U P, 1979), 333-54.
“Religion, Poetry, and the Rise of Literary Humanism: The Nineteenth-Century
Matrix,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 47 (1979),
251-72.
“The Context of Browning’s Painter Poems: Aesthetics, Polemics,
Historics,” PMLA 95 (1980), 367-88.
“Heroic Egotism: Goethe and the Fortunes of Bildung in Victorian
England,” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: One Hundred Years of Continuing
Vitality, ed. Ulrich Goebel & W. T. Zyla, (Lubbock: Texas Tech P,
1984), 41-60.
“Matthew Arnold and Culture: The History and the Pre-History,” Matthew
Arnold in His Time and Ours: Centenary Essays, ed. Clinton Machann and
Forrest D. Burt (Charlottesville: U P of Virginia, 1988), 1-16.
|
