"L'Ecrivain Edouard Glissant est mort." LE MONDE February 4, 2011.

Chantre éloquent de la diversité et du métissage, le grand écrivain antillais Edouard Glissant est mort le 3 février, à Paris, à l'âge de 82 ans. Poète, romancier, essayiste, auteur dramatique et penseur de la "créolisation", il était né à Sainte-Marie (Martinique) le 21 septembre 1928 et avait suivi des études de philosophie et d'ethnologie, à Paris.

Le prix Renaudot attribué, en 1958, à son roman La Lézarde, fit connaître du grand public cet intellectuel qui ne sépara jamais sa création littéraire d'une réflexion militante. Influencé par la philosophie de Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, il a fait une utilisation politique de l'histoire et de la géographie des Caraïbes, manifestant sa révolte contre les racismes de toutes sortes et rappelant la tâche indélébile de l'esclavagisme sur les relations de la France avec l'Afrique et tout "l'outre-mer".

S'opposant à tout système imposé, à tout refus de l'autre, Edouard Glissant a été le chantre du métissage et de l'échange, formulant dans les essais regroupés au sein de la série "Poétique" sa thèse sur la "Philosophie de la relation" et la "Poétique du divers". Lui-même a refusé de s'enfermer dans un genre unique, circulant en permanence entre le roman, l'essai et le poème, y compris au sein de chaque ouvrage. . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.lemonde.fr/carnet/article/2011/02/03/l-ecrivain-edouard-glissant-est-mort_1474457_3382.html.

Death: Frank Kermode (1919 - 2010).

Flood, Alison: Celebrated Critic Frank Kermode Dies Aged 90 Guardian August 18, 2010:

Prominent in literary criticism since the 1950s, Kermode held "virtually every endowed chair worth having in the British Isles", according to his former colleague John Sutherland, from King Edward VII professor of English literature at Cambridge to Lord Northcliffe professor of modern English literature at University College London and professor of poetry at Harvard, along with honorary doctorates from universities around the world. He was knighted in 1991, the first literary critic to be so honoured since William Empson.

A renowned Shakespearean, publishing Shakespeare's Language in 2001, Kermode's books range from works on Spenser and Donne and the memoir Not Entitled to last year's Concerning E. M. Forster.

His publisher, Alan Samson, at Weidenfeld & Nicolson said Kermode would probably be most remembered for The Sense of An Ending, his collection of lectures on the relationship of fiction to concepts of apocalyptic chaos and crisis, first published in 1967, as well as for Romantic Image, a study of the Romantic movement up until WB Yeats. . . .

He fundamentally changed the study of English literature in the 1960s by introducing French theory by post-structuralists such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, and post-Freudians such as Jacques Lacan, into what Sutherland described as "the torpid bloodstream of British academic discourse". Speaking to Sutherland in 2006, Kermode admitted that the move had "attracted quite a lot of opprobrium".

Although he later moved away from theory, he told Sutherland that the time considering it was not wasted. "One of the great benefits of seriously reading English is you're forced to read a lot of other things," he said. "You may not have a very deep acquaintance with Hegel but you need to know something about Hegel. Or Hobbes, or Aristotle, or Roland Barthes. We're all smatterers in a way, I suppose. But a certain amount of civilisation depends on intelligent smattering." . . .

Mullan, John: Sir Frank Kermode Obituary Guardian August 18, 2010:

When Frank Kermode's elegant, melancholy, often very funny autobiography, Not Entitled, was published in 1995, many reviewers commented on the irony of its title and its tone. Its author was an academic who had gained every honour in his field, who had occupied several of the most illustrious chairs of English literature and, rarest of achievements for a literary critic, even been knighted. Yet Kermode, who has died aged 90, presented himself in his memoir as a slightly bemused outsider, unworthy of most of his successes, drifting into appointments and undertakings, guided mostly by accident.

This self-image, however artful, was true to the man, and the ironic, self-deprecating voice of Not Entitled was his voice. What he called there his "permanent condition of mild alienation" was temperamental – a distance from things that made him, in person, a wry observer of academic follies. The separateness was also, as he saw it, something to do with his upbringing. . . .

Sir Frank Kermode Telegraph August 18, 2010:

Sir Frank Kermode, who died on August 17 aged 90, was the most eminent critic of English literature since FR Leavis; his teaching career culminated in the senior English professorship at Cambridge University, a post he surrendered in 1982 in the aftermath of a widely reported doctrinal rift within the faculty. . . .

The Sense of an Ending gave notice of Kermode's increasing tolerance of modern literary criticism and of its interest less in the content of a work than in its form and structure. From 1967 to 1974 he taught at University College, London, a period that witnessed the birth of new literary theories, notably structuralism and deconstruction. These held that readers should no longer study a text with a view to discerning an objective meaning, since in the modern world texts might have an infinite number of equally valid meanings, each of equal cultural weight, each peculiar to the reader.

Although Kermode was later capable of castigating the gibberish written by many proponents of these ideas, he was always open-minded, and in the late 1960s was an important supporter of the further investigation of these new theories. In a celebrated coup, he arranged for the structuralist Roland Barthes to lecture at UCL. . . .

When he was offered the Regius Professorship in 1974, he hesitated to accept, as he was happy in London and had been warned about the atmosphere at Cambridge. Once there, he found a badly-organised faculty which was ill-disposed to change. Kermode later said that the happiest of his eight years at Cambridge was the one he spent as a visiting professor at Harvard.

The row that brought about his resignation in 1982 was presented in the press as a conflict in teaching methods between the traditionalists and the modernists, among whose ranks was Kermode. In reality, the dispute revolved around a junior lecturer, the structuralist Colin MacCabe, whose promotion the traditionalists had tried to block. Kermode's support was not so much for a dogma as for a talented colleague he thought had been unjustly treated; but his arguments did not carry the day. Shortly afterwards he resigned his post and fled Cambridge for a post in New York. . . .

See also:

• Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher: Frank Kermode, a Critic who Wrote with Style, is Dead at 90 New York Times August 18, 2010
• Shapiro, T. Rees: British Literary Critic Frank Kermode Dies at Age 90 Washington Post August 19, 2010.

Death: Michael C. Leff (? - 2010).

Please see the obituary written by Michael Osborn for Michael C. Leff below: Michael Leff, chair of the Department of Communication at the University of Memphis, died Friday morning, February 5, after a brief illness. Mike was internationally known as a scholar of rhetoric, having returned only recently from China where he was working to set up a student exchange program. Among his many honors, he had been designated by the National Communication Association as a Distinguished Scholar. At his death he was president of the Rhetoric Society of America, and had been busy planning the Society’s May convention in Minneapolis up until the day before his death. Mike was the intellectual leader of a school of criticism that emphasizes close textual analysis of speeches and other rhetorical documents. For his many publications, he had been awarded the NCA’s Wichelns-Winans award, the Woolbert award for influential scholarship, and the Ehninger award for a sustained program of research. He had also received the award for Distinguished Scholarship from the International Society for the Study of Argumentation. He served as editor of Rhetorica, the journal of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, and as the founding president of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric. While he took pleasure in the many awards he had received, Mike took most joy in watching his graduate students succeed in establishing scholarly careers of their own. He was a demanding but convivial teacher who inspired students and colleagues by his encouragement of their initiatives and by his dedication to the study of rhetoric in society. As Chaucer might have noted of him, “Gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.” Before coming to the University of Memphis, Mike had taught at the University of California at Davis, the University of Indiana, the University of Wisconsin, and at Northwestern University, where he had served as chair of the Department of Communication Studies. While in Chicago, he took special pride in teaching in the Odyssey program, designed to bring high quality liberal arts education to low income people. As a local leader here, Mike helped bring the Ph. D. program at the University of Memphis to both respectability and leadership. He developed a vision for the Department which emphasized enhancement of its outstanding program in film production, support of a program in health communication, and the encouragement of a center for the study of African American speaking of the Civil Rights era. He served on the Board of Directors for the Memphis Urban Debate League, a cause in which he passionately believed, and for FirstWorks, Inc. a Memphis-based non-profit organization that serves children who reside in some of the poorest zip codes of the city. These children have great potential for success but they have been declared at-risk by the school and juvenile court systems due to homelessness, neglect, and/or abandonment. Their cause became Leff’s cause. He also served on the Board of Directors for Humanities Tennessee, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. As a friend, Mike was simply a joyful and radiant person. He was an ideal dinner and wine-tasting companion, who entertained with a wealth of hilarious stories. In recent years he had become a dedicated fan of the Grizzlies, the NBA team in Memphis. A celebration of his life and career is being planned for the RSA convention in Minneapolis. The celebration will feature his scholarship and his teaching, but what drove both were his humanity, his humor, and his kindness. Those who wish to honor his memory are encouraged to send contributions in lieu of flowers to the Church Health Center, 1210 Peabody Ave., Memphis, TN 38104-4506. While we grieve his death, we will forever be grateful for his life. (Does anyone know his date of birth?) His faculty webpage is here: http://www.memphis.edu/communication/leff.php. The PhilWeb page devoted to Leff is here: http://www.phillwebb.net/topics/communication/Leff/Leff.htm.

Dell Hymes (1927 - 2009).

Dell Hathaway Hymes (June 7, 1927, Portland, Oregon - November 13, 2009, Charlottesville, Virginia) was a sociolinguist, anthropologist, and folklorist whose work dealt primarily with languages of the Pacific Northwest. He was one of the first to call the fourth subfield of anthropology "linguistic anthropology" instead of "anthropological linguistics." The terminological shift draws attention to the field's grounding in anthropology rather than in what by that time was already become an autonomous discipline (linguistics). Further information on his life and career may be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Hymes. His Faculty Page at the University of Virginia may be found here: http://www.virginia.edu/anthropology/dhymes.html.

DEATH: Claude Levi-Strauss (1908 - 2009).

Update: See the following obituaries:

• Anon.: Claude Lévi-Strauss Telegraph November 3, 2009
• Anon.: Claude Lévi-Strauss French Social Anthropologist Times November 4, 2009
• Bloch, Maurice: Claude Lévi-Strauss Obituary Guardian November 3, 2009
• Droit, Roger-Pol: L'Ethnologue Claude Lévi-Strauss est mort Le Monde November 3, 2009
• Kuper, Adam: Claude Levi-Strauss . . . Father of Modern Anthropology Independent November 4, 2009
• Rothstein, Edward: Claude Lévi-Strauss, 100, Dies New York Times November 4, 2009

Original Post (November 3, 2009): Claude Levi-Strauss, the eminent Structuralist anthropologist, died today, November 3. For more information on his life and career, see the Wikipedia entry in English here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_L%C3%A9vi-Strauss) or for information on his publications, visit his PhilWeb page here (http://www.phillwebb.net/History/TwentiethCentury/Continental/(Post)Structuralisms/Structuralism/Levi-Strauss/L%C3%A9vi-Strauss.htm). See also the BBC article on his passing here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8340936.stm.

Death: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950-2009).

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose critical writings on the ambiguities of sexual identity in fiction helped create the discipline known as queer studies, died April 13 in Manhattan. She was 58.

Read the New York Times obituary here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/arts/15sedgwick.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&emc=eta1&adxnnlx=1239984171-lMriwPkxnTyRBSRwXMQDlg.

Read a tribute here: http://www.hastac.org/node/2081.

UC, Riverside Literature Professor Found Murdered.

An autopsy is scheduled Wednesday on the body of well-known English Professor Lindon Barrett, who was apparently murdered last week in his apartment in Long Beach. The body was found in an advanced state of decomposition, according to the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office, where the autopsy will take place. . . . [Barrett was a well-known UC, Irvine professor associated with the prestigious Critical Theory Institute and author of Blackness and Value: Seeing Double, among other items, who had recently moved to UC, Riverside. See his new Faculty page here: http://english.ucr.edu/people/faculty/barrett/index.html.] Read the article here: http://collegelife.freedomblogging.com/2008/07/15/breaking-news-former-uci-professor-found-murdered/.