(1917-1999)
Ian Watt, the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of English emeritus and the author of many influential books and articles, including The Rise of the Novel (1957), Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (1980), and Myths of Modern Individualism (1996), died in Menlo Park on December 13, 1999, after a long, distressing illness, heart-rending to his family and all who knew him. Born in Windermere, England, he attended the Dover County School for boys and St. John's College, Cambridge, where he took first class honours in the English Tripos. That was the start of an academic career of international distinction and enduring importance-though interrupted for seven years by World War II. Watt was wounded and captured when Singapore fell to Japan, and between 1942 and 1945, he lived as a prisoner of war in the labor camps on the River Kwai. This experience shaped his vision of life, his intellect, and his will. While a prisoner, he read Shakespeare, Dante, and Swift (sometimes using pages he had finished to make cigarette wrappers). In the camps, he suffered from malnutrition and the effects of his wounds, but his strong constitution and indomitable temperament helped him to survive.
After the war, he returned to St. John's, resuming his research. From 1946-48 he held Commonwealth fellowships, first, at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he met his wife Ruth, and then at Harvard, where he studied with the eighteenth-century specialist George Sherburn and the sociologist Talcott Parsons. From 1948-52, he taught at St. John's, Cambridge, and in 1952 joined the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley, where he remained for a decade. There, he published his first and best-known book, The Rise of the Novel (1957). In 1962 he became Dean of the School of English Studies at the newly-founded University of East Anglia. In 1964 he returned to California to teach at Stanford, becoming chair of the English Department in the turbulent years from 1968-71 and later founding director of the Stanford Humanities Center from 1980-85. The choice of a name for the Stanford Humanities Center, seemingly an inevitable one, was in fact the product of Watt's insistence on directness and his resistance to names that might have seemed more fashionable.
The Rise of the Novel is generally acknowledged to be one of the most influential works of literary criticism in the twentieth century; among other languages, it has been translated into German, Polish, Hindi, and Italian. No modern work has been more important in generating, directly and indirectly, the critical study of fiction and its problematic relationship to life. This investigation of the origins of the English novel has lasted in a way remarkable in literary criticism, and the most interesting studies of the development of the novel form still explicitly reckon with it. Watt integrated New Criticism's close readings with a concern for such historical factors as economic change, class and gender determinants, the dynamics of a reading public, cultural and philosophical influences, social psychology, and theories of narrative that had been missing or slighted in earlier criticism. In The Rise of the Novel, and later in Joseph Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (1980) his magisterial study of the novelist and his early career, Watt's boldness in taking the study of literature beyond textual analysis into realms of sociology, ideology, and cultural relations, and then back into individual novels for richer and more complex readings, remains as impressive as ever. His method, his analysis, and his plain, accessible prose broadened the range of literary scholarship in the second half of the twentieth century. He played a crucial role in opening up for literary studies fields for scholars of all bents--fields consisting, to be sure, of turf to fight about. His interdisciplinary method was instrumental in bringing about the interaction of many critical practices and positions-structuralist, psychoanalytic, and feminist interpretation, reader-response theory, biography, neo-Marxism, and "new historicism," for instance, that have preoccupied critics of the last two decades.
Those who knew Ian remember his courage and tenacity, his energy, his kindness, and his sometimes devastating candor (once he told a member of the committee that his manuscript in progress, eventually his first book, was "very good--but I wouldn't recommend publishing it;" to another member he said, during the late '60s-early '70s campus upheavals, "my dear boy, just because you're a good chap doesn't mean that what you're doing isn't helping to wreck the university--I wouldn't want you to think that you're not a barbarian"). He had an irrepressible delight in the ludicrous and kept a file that he labeled--in a hybrid "Franglais"--"sottiseries." He greatly liked to laugh. He also liked a martini at lunch in the Faculty Club as well as-- defying the nutritional labeling system that for some years disfigured the Faculty Club menu--the Club's cheeseburgers of blessed memory. Ian Watt was resistant to fads and faddishness and was always, above all, himself. The academic honors he received, Guggenheim and other fellowships, membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, all were the fruits of an intelligence that never yielded to the conventional or to the prevailing currents of the time.
Watt once said, insisting that he was being hard-headed, not sentimental, that he was sure that, in his World-War II internment, it was the fact that works of literature existed and could still touch him--and his awareness of what that fact said about humanity--that enabled him to survive. No wonder that the fundamental dynamic of his work would become the desire to expose the play between literary texts and reality beyond those texts and to understand the processes that unite "fiction" and "life." The founding director of The Stanford Humanities Center was one of the greatest humanists in Stanford's history.
He is survived by his wife, Ruth Mellinkoff Watt, by their children George Watt and Josephine Reed, and by two grandchildren.
Committee:
Bliss Carnochan, Chair
Robert M. Polhemus
Terry Castle