Richard Valentine LeClercq, retired Associate Professor of English,
died July 29, 2005. Val, as he was called by friends and family,
came to The University of Texas as an assistant professor of
English in 1970 after three years of teaching at the University
of Wisconsin at Madison. He was promoted to the rank of associate
professor in 1974 and retired in 2003.
Val was born on June 18, 1942, in Los Angeles. He received his
B.A. (1964), M.A. (1966), and Ph.D. (1968) from UCLA. As an undergraduate,
he swam the butterfly on the swim team and sang tenor in the
Opera Workshop. As a graduate student, he served as a teaching
assistant and as associate editor of the UCLA edition of The
Works of John Dryden, later publishing scholarship on Dryden’s
dramatic criticism. His monograph on Richard Crashaw’s Epithalamium appeared
in the University of Wisconsin Literary Monographs Series in
1975. Later in his career, his research concentrated on problems
of methodology in literary scholarship, which was also a focus
of his teaching not only in his theory classes but also in his
literature classes on Milton and seventeenth-century poetry.
In his later career, Val suffered from serious illness, and when hospitalized
or homebound, always seemed to find devoted students to help care
for him. For his genuine contributions to the discipline in his
earlier years, the Department of English will always be grateful.
Scholarly Publications
The Works of John Dryden, associate editor, XVII. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971.
Crashaw’s Epithalamium: Pattern and Vision, in Literary Monographs, 6. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975.
“Corneille and An Essay of Dramatic Poesy,” Comparative
Literature 22 (1970), 319-27.
“The Academic Nature of the Whole Discourse of An Essay
of Dramatic Poesy,” Papers on Language and Literature 8 (1972), 27-38.
“The Reciprocal Harmony of Jonson’s ‘A Celebration of Charis,’” Texas
Studies in Literature and Language 16 (1975), 627-50.
<signed>
William Powers Jr., 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
James D. Garrison (chair), Dolora Wojciehowski, and Kate Frost.
