{"id":72519,"date":"2011-02-17T10:00:51","date_gmt":"2011-02-17T15:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"\/gazette\/?p=72519"},"modified":"2011-02-17T10:00:51","modified_gmt":"2011-02-17T15:00:51","slug":"claudio-guillen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2011\/02\/claudio-guillen\/","title":{"rendered":"Claudio Guill\u00e9n"},"content":{"rendered":"<header\n\tclass=\"wp-block-harvard-gazette-article-header alignfull article-header is-style-square has-light-background has-colored-heading\"\n\tstyle=\" \"\n>\n\t\n\t<div class=\"article-header__content\">\n\t\t\t<a\n\t\t\tclass=\"article-header__category\"\n\t\t\thref=\"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/section\/campus-community\/\"\n\t\t>\n\t\t\tCampus &amp; Community\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\n\t\t<h1 class=\"article-header__title wp-block-heading has-large-text\">\n\t\tClaudio Guill\u00e9n\t<\/h1>\n\n\t\n\t\n\t<div class=\"article-header__meta\">\n\t\t<div class=\"wp-block-post-author\">\n\t\t\t<address class=\"wp-block-post-author__content\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/address>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t<time class=\"article-header__date\" datetime=\"2011-02-17\">\n\t\t\tFebruary 17, 2011\t\t<\/time>\n\n\t\t<span class=\"article-header__reading-time\">\n\t\t\t6 min read\t\t<\/span>\n\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\n\t\t\t<h2 class=\"article-header__subheading wp-block-heading\">\n\t\t\tFaculty of Arts and Sciences \u2014 Memorial Minute\t\t<\/h2>\n\t\t\n<\/header>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-group alignwide has-global-padding is-content-justification-center is-layout-constrained wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained\">\n\n\n\t\t<p><em>At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on February 1, 2011, the following Minute was placed upon the records.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Claudio Guill\u00e9n was born in Paris, and was brought up partly in that city.\u00a0 His father, Jorge Guill\u00e9n, was a major poet of the \u201cgeneration of 1927\u201d in Spain and also taught poetry at the Sorbonne, the University of Oxford, and the University of Seville; Claudio&#8217;s mother, Germaine Cahen, belonged to an assimilated Franco-Jewish family.\u00a0 His sister, Teresa Gilman, recalls that the family shuttled between Spain and France, spending several months each year in Paris.\u00a0 The children grew up bilingual in French and Spanish, and soon added English to their repertoire; thus began Claudio Guill\u00e9n\u2019s distinguished career as a citizen of the world and tireless promoter of comparative literature.\u00a0 For him, comparative literature was not just an academic field\u2014it was a way of life.\u00a0 As he put it in one of his important books, The Challenge of Comparative Literature, the field could be regarded \u201cas a yearning rather than an object.\u201d\u00a0 In his case the yearning was both maximalist and pragmatic; the question that concerned him was not the static \u201cWhat is literature?\u201d but rather \u201cWhat has literature been in different cultures and epochs?\u201d\u00a0 He sought to chart literary history in time and space, questioning and reconstruing every term used by others and by himself.<\/p>\n<p>History with a capital \u201cH\u201d had no small role in Claudio Guill\u00e9n\u2019s personal history.\u00a0 At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, he and his sister were sent to live with their grandmother in Paris, where their mother joined them the following year.\u00a0 Their father succeeded in leaving Spain in 1938, eventually obtaining a teaching position at McGill University in Montreal; the family joined him in May 1939, shortly before the outbreak of World War II.\u00a0 In 1940 they moved to Wellesley, Massachusetts, where Jorge Guill\u00e9n taught at Wellesley College until his retirement in 1957.\u00a0 Claudio and his sister attended French schools in Montreal and New York City.\u00a0 Claudio obtained a baccalaureate in 1941; two years later, he graduated from Williams College, which he attended on a scholarship.\u00a0 He soon entered the graduate program in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where his mentors were Harry Levin and Renato Poggioli, giants in the field; four decades later, in 1983, Claudio himself became the first Harry Levin Professor of Literature at Harvard.<\/p>\n<p>Claudio Guill\u00e9n obtained his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 1953, with a dissertation titled \u201cThe Anatomies of Roguery: A Comparative Study in the Origins and the Nature of Picaresque Literature.\u201d\u00a0 Teresa Gilman recalls that he wrote a large part of the dissertation in Cologne, Germany, where he had obtained a teaching position.\u00a0 While there he met Elfriede J\u00e4ger, whom he married in 1958; the couple were separated in 1978 and later divorced.<\/p>\n<p>After obtaining his doctorate, Claudio Guill\u00e9n taught at Princeton University and then the University of California at San Diego, where he was a founder of the Comparative Literature program.\u00a0 In 1978, a few years after publishing his book Literature as System: Essays toward the Theory of Literary History, he was invited to join the Harvard faculty as Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Languages and Literatures.\u00a0 Aside from his personal friendships, Claudio had a family tie at Harvard:\u00a0 Stephen Gilman, a professor of Spanish literature, was married to his sister, Teresa.\u00a0 During his years at Harvard, Claudio was deeply involved in the university\u2019s intellectual and social life; trained as a literary historian, he was also open to new ideas and methodologies\u2014thus he was one of the founders of the Literature concentration, known for its focus on critical theory.\u00a0 Those who knew him, whether colleagues or students, were charmed by his effortless elegance, the breadth of his erudition\u2014he seemed to have read everything and forgotten none of it, as one friend said\u2014and, above all, his kindness and modesty.\u00a0 His was a spirit of cosmopolitanism in the best sense of the term.<\/p>\n<p>Despite his close ties to Harvard, starting in the early 1980s, when Spanish intellectual life found new vigor after the death of General Francisco Franco, Claudio Guill\u00e9n spent more and more time in Spain.\u00a0 He took leaves from Harvard in 1983-1984 and 1987-1988, and started teaching at the Universidad Aut\u00f3noma de Barcelona.\u00a0 After that he moved to the Pompeu Fabra University, also in Barcelona\u2014in popular parlance, Pompeu Fabra is known as Pompeu Harvard!\u00a0 In both institutions, Claudio Guill\u00e9n created pioneering departments of Comparative Literature, which served as models for similar innovations throughout the rest of the country.\u00a0 He retired from Harvard in 1988, but returned at least twice to his former departments to give their most prestigious lectures: the Renato Poggioli Lecture in Comparative Literature and the Raimundo Lida Lecture in Romance Languages and Literatures.<\/p>\n<p>During his two decades in Spain, Claudio Guill\u00e9n was perhaps the best known and most respected literary intellectual in the country, publishing several highly acclaimed books and a steady stream of articles in literary magazines and in the cultural supplements of daily newspapers.\u00a0 His first book after his return, Entre lo uno y lo diverso: Introducci\u00f3n a la Literatura Comparada (1985), the product of his first course in Barcelona, became a\u00a0 widely influential textbook; it was translated into English as The Challenge of Comparative Literature (1993).\u00a0 His fifth Spanish book, M\u00faltiples Moradas (Multiple Dwellings, 1998), won the National Prize for Nonfiction.\u00a0 After his retirement from teaching in 1994, he remained prodigiously active in a number of important cultural ventures: most famously, he was general editor of the prestigious Biblioteca de Literatura Universal, the Spanish equivalent of France\u2019s Biblioth\u00e8que de la Pl\u00e9iade.\u00a0 He was elected to the Spanish Royal Academy in 2002, and was part of the committee that awarded the annual Pr\u00edncipe de Asturias Prize, the most distinguished award given by the Spanish government.\u00a0 In 1993, he married Margarita Ram\u00edrez and the couple divided their time between Madrid and the south of Spain.<\/p>\n<p>Claudio Guill\u00e9n died in his home in Madrid on January 27, 2007, while watching The African Queen with his wife.\u00a0 In the ensuing days, all the major newspapers in Spain published long articles eulogizing his life and work.<\/p>\n<p>Respectfully submitted,<\/p>\n<p>Donald Fanger<\/p>\n<p>Luis Fern\u00e1ndez-Cifuentes<\/p>\n<p>Francisco M\u00e1rquez-Villanueva<\/p>\n<p>Susan Rubin Suleiman, Chair<\/p>\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on February 1, 2011, the Minute honoring the life and service of the late Claudio Guill\u00e9n, Harry Levin Professor of Literature, Emeritus, was placed upon the records.\u00a0Professor Guill\u00e9n was a tireless promoter of comparative literature. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105622744,"featured_media":73349,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"gz_ga_pageviews":7,"gz_ga_lastupdated":"2019-01-20 22:09","document_color_palette":null,"author":"","affiliation":"","_category_override":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1364],"tags":[8501,8967,12922,12941,16998,21886,27718,29892,34784],"gazette-formats":[],"series":[],"class_list":["post-72519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-campus-community","tag-claudio-guillen","tag-comparative-literature","tag-faculty","tag-faculty-of-arts-and-sciences","tag-history","tag-literature","tag-poetry","tag-romance-languages-and-literatures","tag-universidad-autonoma-de-barcelona"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v23.0 (Yoast SEO v27.1.1) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Claudio Guill\u00e9n &#8212; 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Community\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\n\t\t<h1 class=\"article-header__title wp-block-heading has-large-text\">\n\t\tClaudio Guill\u00e9n\t<\/h1>\n\n\t\n\t\n\t<div class=\"article-header__meta\">\n\t\t<div class=\"wp-block-post-author\">\n\t\t\t<address class=\"wp-block-post-author__content\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/address>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t<time class=\"article-header__date\" datetime=\"2011-02-17\">\n\t\t\tFebruary 17, 2011\t\t<\/time>\n\n\t\t<span class=\"article-header__reading-time\">\n\t\t\t6 min read\t\t<\/span>\n\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\n\t\t\t<h2 class=\"article-header__subheading wp-block-heading\">\n\t\t\tFaculty of Arts and Sciences \u2014 Memorial Minute\t\t<\/h2>\n\t\t\n<\/header>\n"},"2":{"blockName":"core\/group","attrs":{"templateLock":false,"metadata":{"name":"Article content"},"align":"wide","layout":{"type":"constrained","justifyContent":"center"},"tagName":"div","lock":[],"className":"","style":[],"backgroundColor":"","textColor":"","gradient":"","fontSize":"","fontFamily":"","borderColor":"","ariaLabel":"","anchor":""},"innerBlocks":[{"blockName":"core\/freeform","attrs":{"content":"","lock":[],"metadata":[]},"innerBlocks":[],"innerHTML":"\n\t\t<p><em>At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on February 1, 2011, the following Minute was placed upon the records.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Claudio Guill\u00e9n was born in Paris, and was brought up partly in that city.\u00a0 His father, Jorge Guill\u00e9n, was a major poet of the \u201cgeneration of 1927\u201d in Spain and also taught poetry at the Sorbonne, the University of Oxford, and the University of Seville; Claudio's mother, Germaine Cahen, belonged to an assimilated Franco-Jewish family.\u00a0 His sister, Teresa Gilman, recalls that the family shuttled between Spain and France, spending several months each year in Paris.\u00a0 The children grew up bilingual in French and Spanish, and soon added English to their repertoire; thus began Claudio Guill\u00e9n\u2019s distinguished career as a citizen of the world and tireless promoter of comparative literature.\u00a0 For him, comparative literature was not just an academic field\u2014it was a way of life.\u00a0 As he put it in one of his important books, The Challenge of Comparative Literature, the field could be regarded \u201cas a yearning rather than an object.\u201d\u00a0 In his case the yearning was both maximalist and pragmatic; the question that concerned him was not the static \u201cWhat is literature?\u201d but rather \u201cWhat has literature been in different cultures and epochs?\u201d\u00a0 He sought to chart literary history in time and space, questioning and reconstruing every term used by others and by himself.<\/p>\n<p>History with a capital \u201cH\u201d had no small role in Claudio Guill\u00e9n\u2019s personal history.\u00a0 At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, he and his sister were sent to live with their grandmother in Paris, where their mother joined them the following year.\u00a0 Their father succeeded in leaving Spain in 1938, eventually obtaining a teaching position at McGill University in Montreal; the family joined him in May 1939, shortly before the outbreak of World War II.\u00a0 In 1940 they moved to Wellesley, Massachusetts, where Jorge Guill\u00e9n taught at Wellesley College until his retirement in 1957.\u00a0 Claudio and his sister attended French schools in Montreal and New York City.\u00a0 Claudio obtained a baccalaureate in 1941; two years later, he graduated from Williams College, which he attended on a scholarship.\u00a0 He soon entered the graduate program in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where his mentors were Harry Levin and Renato Poggioli, giants in the field; four decades later, in 1983, Claudio himself became the first Harry Levin Professor of Literature at Harvard.<\/p>\n<p>Claudio Guill\u00e9n obtained his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 1953, with a dissertation titled \u201cThe Anatomies of Roguery: A Comparative Study in the Origins and the Nature of Picaresque Literature.\u201d\u00a0 Teresa Gilman recalls that he wrote a large part of the dissertation in Cologne, Germany, where he had obtained a teaching position.\u00a0 While there he met Elfriede J\u00e4ger, whom he married in 1958; the couple were separated in 1978 and later divorced.<\/p>\n<p>After obtaining his doctorate, Claudio Guill\u00e9n taught at Princeton University and then the University of California at San Diego, where he was a founder of the Comparative Literature program.\u00a0 In 1978, a few years after publishing his book Literature as System: Essays toward the Theory of Literary History, he was invited to join the Harvard faculty as Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Languages and Literatures.\u00a0 Aside from his personal friendships, Claudio had a family tie at Harvard:\u00a0 Stephen Gilman, a professor of Spanish literature, was married to his sister, Teresa.\u00a0 During his years at Harvard, Claudio was deeply involved in the university\u2019s intellectual and social life; trained as a literary historian, he was also open to new ideas and methodologies\u2014thus he was one of the founders of the Literature concentration, known for its focus on critical theory.\u00a0 Those who knew him, whether colleagues or students, were charmed by his effortless elegance, the breadth of his erudition\u2014he seemed to have read everything and forgotten none of it, as one friend said\u2014and, above all, his kindness and modesty.\u00a0 His was a spirit of cosmopolitanism in the best sense of the term.<\/p>\n<p>Despite his close ties to Harvard, starting in the early 1980s, when Spanish intellectual life found new vigor after the death of General Francisco Franco, Claudio Guill\u00e9n spent more and more time in Spain.\u00a0 He took leaves from Harvard in 1983-1984 and 1987-1988, and started teaching at the Universidad Aut\u00f3noma de Barcelona.\u00a0 After that he moved to the Pompeu Fabra University, also in Barcelona\u2014in popular parlance, Pompeu Fabra is known as Pompeu Harvard!\u00a0 In both institutions, Claudio Guill\u00e9n created pioneering departments of Comparative Literature, which served as models for similar innovations throughout the rest of the country.\u00a0 He retired from Harvard in 1988, but returned at least twice to his former departments to give their most prestigious lectures: the Renato Poggioli Lecture in Comparative Literature and the Raimundo Lida Lecture in Romance Languages and Literatures.<\/p>\n<p>During his two decades in Spain, Claudio Guill\u00e9n was perhaps the best known and most respected literary intellectual in the country, publishing several highly acclaimed books and a steady stream of articles in literary magazines and in the cultural supplements of daily newspapers.\u00a0 His first book after his return, Entre lo uno y lo diverso: Introducci\u00f3n a la Literatura Comparada (1985), the product of his first course in Barcelona, became a\u00a0 widely influential textbook; it was translated into English as The Challenge of Comparative Literature (1993).\u00a0 His fifth Spanish book, M\u00faltiples Moradas (Multiple Dwellings, 1998), won the National Prize for Nonfiction.\u00a0 After his retirement from teaching in 1994, he remained prodigiously active in a number of important cultural ventures: most famously, he was general editor of the prestigious Biblioteca de Literatura Universal, the Spanish equivalent of France\u2019s Biblioth\u00e8que de la Pl\u00e9iade.\u00a0 He was elected to the Spanish Royal Academy in 2002, and was part of the committee that awarded the annual Pr\u00edncipe de Asturias Prize, the most distinguished award given by the Spanish government.\u00a0 In 1993, he married Margarita Ram\u00edrez and the couple divided their time between Madrid and the south of Spain.<\/p>\n<p>Claudio Guill\u00e9n died in his home in Madrid on January 27, 2007, while watching The African Queen with his wife.\u00a0 In the ensuing days, all the major newspapers in Spain published long articles eulogizing his life and work.<\/p>\n<p>Respectfully submitted,<\/p>\n<p>Donald Fanger<\/p>\n<p>Luis Fern\u00e1ndez-Cifuentes<\/p>\n<p>Francisco M\u00e1rquez-Villanueva<\/p>\n<p>Susan Rubin Suleiman, Chair<\/p>\n","innerContent":["\n\t\t<p><em>At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on February 1, 2011, the following Minute was placed upon the records.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Claudio Guill\u00e9n was born in Paris, and was brought up partly in that city.\u00a0 His father, Jorge Guill\u00e9n, was a major poet of the \u201cgeneration of 1927\u201d in Spain and also taught poetry at the Sorbonne, the University of Oxford, and the University of Seville; Claudio's mother, Germaine Cahen, belonged to an assimilated Franco-Jewish family.\u00a0 His sister, Teresa Gilman, recalls that the family shuttled between Spain and France, spending several months each year in Paris.\u00a0 The children grew up bilingual in French and Spanish, and soon added English to their repertoire; thus began Claudio Guill\u00e9n\u2019s distinguished career as a citizen of the world and tireless promoter of comparative literature.\u00a0 For him, comparative literature was not just an academic field\u2014it was a way of life.\u00a0 As he put it in one of his important books, The Challenge of Comparative Literature, the field could be regarded \u201cas a yearning rather than an object.\u201d\u00a0 In his case the yearning was both maximalist and pragmatic; the question that concerned him was not the static \u201cWhat is literature?\u201d but rather \u201cWhat has literature been in different cultures and epochs?\u201d\u00a0 He sought to chart literary history in time and space, questioning and reconstruing every term used by others and by himself.<\/p>\n<p>History with a capital \u201cH\u201d had no small role in Claudio Guill\u00e9n\u2019s personal history.\u00a0 At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, he and his sister were sent to live with their grandmother in Paris, where their mother joined them the following year.\u00a0 Their father succeeded in leaving Spain in 1938, eventually obtaining a teaching position at McGill University in Montreal; the family joined him in May 1939, shortly before the outbreak of World War II.\u00a0 In 1940 they moved to Wellesley, Massachusetts, where Jorge Guill\u00e9n taught at Wellesley College until his retirement in 1957.\u00a0 Claudio and his sister attended French schools in Montreal and New York City.\u00a0 Claudio obtained a baccalaureate in 1941; two years later, he graduated from Williams College, which he attended on a scholarship.\u00a0 He soon entered the graduate program in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where his mentors were Harry Levin and Renato Poggioli, giants in the field; four decades later, in 1983, Claudio himself became the first Harry Levin Professor of Literature at Harvard.<\/p>\n<p>Claudio Guill\u00e9n obtained his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 1953, with a dissertation titled \u201cThe Anatomies of Roguery: A Comparative Study in the Origins and the Nature of Picaresque Literature.\u201d\u00a0 Teresa Gilman recalls that he wrote a large part of the dissertation in Cologne, Germany, where he had obtained a teaching position.\u00a0 While there he met Elfriede J\u00e4ger, whom he married in 1958; the couple were separated in 1978 and later divorced.<\/p>\n<p>After obtaining his doctorate, Claudio Guill\u00e9n taught at Princeton University and then the University of California at San Diego, where he was a founder of the Comparative Literature program.\u00a0 In 1978, a few years after publishing his book Literature as System: Essays toward the Theory of Literary History, he was invited to join the Harvard faculty as Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Languages and Literatures.\u00a0 Aside from his personal friendships, Claudio had a family tie at Harvard:\u00a0 Stephen Gilman, a professor of Spanish literature, was married to his sister, Teresa.\u00a0 During his years at Harvard, Claudio was deeply involved in the university\u2019s intellectual and social life; trained as a literary historian, he was also open to new ideas and methodologies\u2014thus he was one of the founders of the Literature concentration, known for its focus on critical theory.\u00a0 Those who knew him, whether colleagues or students, were charmed by his effortless elegance, the breadth of his erudition\u2014he seemed to have read everything and forgotten none of it, as one friend said\u2014and, above all, his kindness and modesty.\u00a0 His was a spirit of cosmopolitanism in the best sense of the term.<\/p>\n<p>Despite his close ties to Harvard, starting in the early 1980s, when Spanish intellectual life found new vigor after the death of General Francisco Franco, Claudio Guill\u00e9n spent more and more time in Spain.\u00a0 He took leaves from Harvard in 1983-1984 and 1987-1988, and started teaching at the Universidad Aut\u00f3noma de Barcelona.\u00a0 After that he moved to the Pompeu Fabra University, also in Barcelona\u2014in popular parlance, Pompeu Fabra is known as Pompeu Harvard!\u00a0 In both institutions, Claudio Guill\u00e9n created pioneering departments of Comparative Literature, which served as models for similar innovations throughout the rest of the country.\u00a0 He retired from Harvard in 1988, but returned at least twice to his former departments to give their most prestigious lectures: the Renato Poggioli Lecture in Comparative Literature and the Raimundo Lida Lecture in Romance Languages and Literatures.<\/p>\n<p>During his two decades in Spain, Claudio Guill\u00e9n was perhaps the best known and most respected literary intellectual in the country, publishing several highly acclaimed books and a steady stream of articles in literary magazines and in the cultural supplements of daily newspapers.\u00a0 His first book after his return, Entre lo uno y lo diverso: Introducci\u00f3n a la Literatura Comparada (1985), the product of his first course in Barcelona, became a\u00a0 widely influential textbook; it was translated into English as The Challenge of Comparative Literature (1993).\u00a0 His fifth Spanish book, M\u00faltiples Moradas (Multiple Dwellings, 1998), won the National Prize for Nonfiction.\u00a0 After his retirement from teaching in 1994, he remained prodigiously active in a number of important cultural ventures: most famously, he was general editor of the prestigious Biblioteca de Literatura Universal, the Spanish equivalent of France\u2019s Biblioth\u00e8que de la Pl\u00e9iade.\u00a0 He was elected to the Spanish Royal Academy in 2002, and was part of the committee that awarded the annual Pr\u00edncipe de Asturias Prize, the most distinguished award given by the Spanish government.\u00a0 In 1993, he married Margarita Ram\u00edrez and the couple divided their time between Madrid and the south of Spain.<\/p>\n<p>Claudio Guill\u00e9n died in his home in Madrid on January 27, 2007, while watching The African Queen with his wife.\u00a0 In the ensuing days, all the major newspapers in Spain published long articles eulogizing his life and work.<\/p>\n<p>Respectfully submitted,<\/p>\n<p>Donald Fanger<\/p>\n<p>Luis Fern\u00e1ndez-Cifuentes<\/p>\n<p>Francisco M\u00e1rquez-Villanueva<\/p>\n<p>Susan Rubin Suleiman, Chair<\/p>\n"],"rendered":"\n\t\t<p><em>At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on February 1, 2011, the following Minute was placed upon the records.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Claudio Guill\u00e9n was born in Paris, and was brought up partly in that city.\u00a0 His father, Jorge Guill\u00e9n, was a major poet of the \u201cgeneration of 1927\u201d in Spain and also taught poetry at the Sorbonne, the University of Oxford, and the University of Seville; Claudio's mother, Germaine Cahen, belonged to an assimilated Franco-Jewish family.\u00a0 His sister, Teresa Gilman, recalls that the family shuttled between Spain and France, spending several months each year in Paris.\u00a0 The children grew up bilingual in French and Spanish, and soon added English to their repertoire; thus began Claudio Guill\u00e9n\u2019s distinguished career as a citizen of the world and tireless promoter of comparative literature.\u00a0 For him, comparative literature was not just an academic field\u2014it was a way of life.\u00a0 As he put it in one of his important books, The Challenge of Comparative Literature, the field could be regarded \u201cas a yearning rather than an object.\u201d\u00a0 In his case the yearning was both maximalist and pragmatic; the question that concerned him was not the static \u201cWhat is literature?\u201d but rather \u201cWhat has literature been in different cultures and epochs?\u201d\u00a0 He sought to chart literary history in time and space, questioning and reconstruing every term used by others and by himself.<\/p>\n<p>History with a capital \u201cH\u201d had no small role in Claudio Guill\u00e9n\u2019s personal history.\u00a0 At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, he and his sister were sent to live with their grandmother in Paris, where their mother joined them the following year.\u00a0 Their father succeeded in leaving Spain in 1938, eventually obtaining a teaching position at McGill University in Montreal; the family joined him in May 1939, shortly before the outbreak of World War II.\u00a0 In 1940 they moved to Wellesley, Massachusetts, where Jorge Guill\u00e9n taught at Wellesley College until his retirement in 1957.\u00a0 Claudio and his sister attended French schools in Montreal and New York City.\u00a0 Claudio obtained a baccalaureate in 1941; two years later, he graduated from Williams College, which he attended on a scholarship.\u00a0 He soon entered the graduate program in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where his mentors were Harry Levin and Renato Poggioli, giants in the field; four decades later, in 1983, Claudio himself became the first Harry Levin Professor of Literature at Harvard.<\/p>\n<p>Claudio Guill\u00e9n obtained his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 1953, with a dissertation titled \u201cThe Anatomies of Roguery: A Comparative Study in the Origins and the Nature of Picaresque Literature.\u201d\u00a0 Teresa Gilman recalls that he wrote a large part of the dissertation in Cologne, Germany, where he had obtained a teaching position.\u00a0 While there he met Elfriede J\u00e4ger, whom he married in 1958; the couple were separated in 1978 and later divorced.<\/p>\n<p>After obtaining his doctorate, Claudio Guill\u00e9n taught at Princeton University and then the University of California at San Diego, where he was a founder of the Comparative Literature program.\u00a0 In 1978, a few years after publishing his book Literature as System: Essays toward the Theory of Literary History, he was invited to join the Harvard faculty as Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Languages and Literatures.\u00a0 Aside from his personal friendships, Claudio had a family tie at Harvard:\u00a0 Stephen Gilman, a professor of Spanish literature, was married to his sister, Teresa.\u00a0 During his years at Harvard, Claudio was deeply involved in the university\u2019s intellectual and social life; trained as a literary historian, he was also open to new ideas and methodologies\u2014thus he was one of the founders of the Literature concentration, known for its focus on critical theory.\u00a0 Those who knew him, whether colleagues or students, were charmed by his effortless elegance, the breadth of his erudition\u2014he seemed to have read everything and forgotten none of it, as one friend said\u2014and, above all, his kindness and modesty.\u00a0 His was a spirit of cosmopolitanism in the best sense of the term.<\/p>\n<p>Despite his close ties to Harvard, starting in the early 1980s, when Spanish intellectual life found new vigor after the death of General Francisco Franco, Claudio Guill\u00e9n spent more and more time in Spain.\u00a0 He took leaves from Harvard in 1983-1984 and 1987-1988, and started teaching at the Universidad Aut\u00f3noma de Barcelona.\u00a0 After that he moved to the Pompeu Fabra University, also in Barcelona\u2014in popular parlance, Pompeu Fabra is known as Pompeu Harvard!\u00a0 In both institutions, Claudio Guill\u00e9n created pioneering departments of Comparative Literature, which served as models for similar innovations throughout the rest of the country.\u00a0 He retired from Harvard in 1988, but returned at least twice to his former departments to give their most prestigious lectures: the Renato Poggioli Lecture in Comparative Literature and the Raimundo Lida Lecture in Romance Languages and Literatures.<\/p>\n<p>During his two decades in Spain, Claudio Guill\u00e9n was perhaps the best known and most respected literary intellectual in the country, publishing several highly acclaimed books and a steady stream of articles in literary magazines and in the cultural supplements of daily newspapers.\u00a0 His first book after his return, Entre lo uno y lo diverso: Introducci\u00f3n a la Literatura Comparada (1985), the product of his first course in Barcelona, became a\u00a0 widely influential textbook; it was translated into English as The Challenge of Comparative Literature (1993).\u00a0 His fifth Spanish book, M\u00faltiples Moradas (Multiple Dwellings, 1998), won the National Prize for Nonfiction.\u00a0 After his retirement from teaching in 1994, he remained prodigiously active in a number of important cultural ventures: most famously, he was general editor of the prestigious Biblioteca de Literatura Universal, the Spanish equivalent of France\u2019s Biblioth\u00e8que de la Pl\u00e9iade.\u00a0 He was elected to the Spanish Royal Academy in 2002, and was part of the committee that awarded the annual Pr\u00edncipe de Asturias Prize, the most distinguished award given by the Spanish government.\u00a0 In 1993, he married Margarita Ram\u00edrez and the couple divided their time between Madrid and the south of Spain.<\/p>\n<p>Claudio Guill\u00e9n died in his home in Madrid on January 27, 2007, while watching The African Queen with his wife.\u00a0 In the ensuing days, all the major newspapers in Spain published long articles eulogizing his life and work.<\/p>\n<p>Respectfully submitted,<\/p>\n<p>Donald Fanger<\/p>\n<p>Luis Fern\u00e1ndez-Cifuentes<\/p>\n<p>Francisco M\u00e1rquez-Villanueva<\/p>\n<p>Susan Rubin Suleiman, Chair<\/p>\n"}],"innerHTML":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-group alignwide\">\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n","innerContent":["\n<div class=\"wp-block-group alignwide\">\n\n","\n\n<\/div>\n"],"rendered":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-group alignwide has-global-padding is-content-justification-center is-layout-constrained wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained\">\n\n\n\t\t<p><em>At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on February 1, 2011, the following Minute was placed upon the records.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Claudio Guill\u00e9n was born in Paris, and was brought up partly in that city.\u00a0 His father, Jorge Guill\u00e9n, was a major poet of the \u201cgeneration of 1927\u201d in Spain and also taught poetry at the Sorbonne, the University of Oxford, and the University of Seville; Claudio's mother, Germaine Cahen, belonged to an assimilated Franco-Jewish family.\u00a0 His sister, Teresa Gilman, recalls that the family shuttled between Spain and France, spending several months each year in Paris.\u00a0 The children grew up bilingual in French and Spanish, and soon added English to their repertoire; thus began Claudio Guill\u00e9n\u2019s distinguished career as a citizen of the world and tireless promoter of comparative literature.\u00a0 For him, comparative literature was not just an academic field\u2014it was a way of life.\u00a0 As he put it in one of his important books, The Challenge of Comparative Literature, the field could be regarded \u201cas a yearning rather than an object.\u201d\u00a0 In his case the yearning was both maximalist and pragmatic; the question that concerned him was not the static \u201cWhat is literature?\u201d but rather \u201cWhat has literature been in different cultures and epochs?\u201d\u00a0 He sought to chart literary history in time and space, questioning and reconstruing every term used by others and by himself.<\/p>\n<p>History with a capital \u201cH\u201d had no small role in Claudio Guill\u00e9n\u2019s personal history.\u00a0 At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, he and his sister were sent to live with their grandmother in Paris, where their mother joined them the following year.\u00a0 Their father succeeded in leaving Spain in 1938, eventually obtaining a teaching position at McGill University in Montreal; the family joined him in May 1939, shortly before the outbreak of World War II.\u00a0 In 1940 they moved to Wellesley, Massachusetts, where Jorge Guill\u00e9n taught at Wellesley College until his retirement in 1957.\u00a0 Claudio and his sister attended French schools in Montreal and New York City.\u00a0 Claudio obtained a baccalaureate in 1941; two years later, he graduated from Williams College, which he attended on a scholarship.\u00a0 He soon entered the graduate program in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where his mentors were Harry Levin and Renato Poggioli, giants in the field; four decades later, in 1983, Claudio himself became the first Harry Levin Professor of Literature at Harvard.<\/p>\n<p>Claudio Guill\u00e9n obtained his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 1953, with a dissertation titled \u201cThe Anatomies of Roguery: A Comparative Study in the Origins and the Nature of Picaresque Literature.\u201d\u00a0 Teresa Gilman recalls that he wrote a large part of the dissertation in Cologne, Germany, where he had obtained a teaching position.\u00a0 While there he met Elfriede J\u00e4ger, whom he married in 1958; the couple were separated in 1978 and later divorced.<\/p>\n<p>After obtaining his doctorate, Claudio Guill\u00e9n taught at Princeton University and then the University of California at San Diego, where he was a founder of the Comparative Literature program.\u00a0 In 1978, a few years after publishing his book Literature as System: Essays toward the Theory of Literary History, he was invited to join the Harvard faculty as Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Languages and Literatures.\u00a0 Aside from his personal friendships, Claudio had a family tie at Harvard:\u00a0 Stephen Gilman, a professor of Spanish literature, was married to his sister, Teresa.\u00a0 During his years at Harvard, Claudio was deeply involved in the university\u2019s intellectual and social life; trained as a literary historian, he was also open to new ideas and methodologies\u2014thus he was one of the founders of the Literature concentration, known for its focus on critical theory.\u00a0 Those who knew him, whether colleagues or students, were charmed by his effortless elegance, the breadth of his erudition\u2014he seemed to have read everything and forgotten none of it, as one friend said\u2014and, above all, his kindness and modesty.\u00a0 His was a spirit of cosmopolitanism in the best sense of the term.<\/p>\n<p>Despite his close ties to Harvard, starting in the early 1980s, when Spanish intellectual life found new vigor after the death of General Francisco Franco, Claudio Guill\u00e9n spent more and more time in Spain.\u00a0 He took leaves from Harvard in 1983-1984 and 1987-1988, and started teaching at the Universidad Aut\u00f3noma de Barcelona.\u00a0 After that he moved to the Pompeu Fabra University, also in Barcelona\u2014in popular parlance, Pompeu Fabra is known as Pompeu Harvard!\u00a0 In both institutions, Claudio Guill\u00e9n created pioneering departments of Comparative Literature, which served as models for similar innovations throughout the rest of the country.\u00a0 He retired from Harvard in 1988, but returned at least twice to his former departments to give their most prestigious lectures: the Renato Poggioli Lecture in Comparative Literature and the Raimundo Lida Lecture in Romance Languages and Literatures.<\/p>\n<p>During his two decades in Spain, Claudio Guill\u00e9n was perhaps the best known and most respected literary intellectual in the country, publishing several highly acclaimed books and a steady stream of articles in literary magazines and in the cultural supplements of daily newspapers.\u00a0 His first book after his return, Entre lo uno y lo diverso: Introducci\u00f3n a la Literatura Comparada (1985), the product of his first course in Barcelona, became a\u00a0 widely influential textbook; it was translated into English as The Challenge of Comparative Literature (1993).\u00a0 His fifth Spanish book, M\u00faltiples Moradas (Multiple Dwellings, 1998), won the National Prize for Nonfiction.\u00a0 After his retirement from teaching in 1994, he remained prodigiously active in a number of important cultural ventures: most famously, he was general editor of the prestigious Biblioteca de Literatura Universal, the Spanish equivalent of France\u2019s Biblioth\u00e8que de la Pl\u00e9iade.\u00a0 He was elected to the Spanish Royal Academy in 2002, and was part of the committee that awarded the annual Pr\u00edncipe de Asturias Prize, the most distinguished award given by the Spanish government.\u00a0 In 1993, he married Margarita Ram\u00edrez and the couple divided their time between Madrid and the south of Spain.<\/p>\n<p>Claudio Guill\u00e9n died in his home in Madrid on January 27, 2007, while watching The African Queen with his wife.\u00a0 In the ensuing days, all the major newspapers in Spain published long articles eulogizing his life and work.<\/p>\n<p>Respectfully submitted,<\/p>\n<p>Donald Fanger<\/p>\n<p>Luis Fern\u00e1ndez-Cifuentes<\/p>\n<p>Francisco M\u00e1rquez-Villanueva<\/p>\n<p>Susan Rubin Suleiman, Chair<\/p>\n\n\n<\/div>\n"}},"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":16001,"url":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2009\/07\/damrosch-named-professor-of-comparative-literature\/","url_meta":{"origin":72519,"position":0},"title":"Damrosch named professor of comparative literature","author":"harvardgazette","date":"July 23, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"David Damrosch, a scholar of world literature, has been appointed professor of comparative literature in Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), effective July 1, 2009.","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Campus &amp; Community&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Campus &amp; Community","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/section\/campus-community\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":22765,"url":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2009\/09\/fas-names-six-full-professors-with-tenure\/","url_meta":{"origin":72519,"position":1},"title":"FAS names six full professors with tenure","author":"harvardgazette","date":"September 17, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"From a professor of comparative literature to a professor of Chinese history, the FAS has announced six new tenured professors.","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Campus &amp; Community&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Campus &amp; Community","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/section\/campus-community\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":105057,"url":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2012\/03\/dorrit-cohn-literature-scholar-87\/","url_meta":{"origin":72519,"position":2},"title":"Dorrit Cohn, literature scholar, 87","author":"harvardgazette","date":"March 14, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Dorrit Cohn \u201945, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature Emeritus, died March 11. A professor of German and comparative literature, Cohn was one of three women appointed to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 1971.","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Campus &amp; Community&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Campus &amp; Community","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/section\/campus-community\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/dorritcohenobit_0001_605.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/dorritcohenobit_0001_605.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/dorritcohenobit_0001_605.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":34042,"url":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2009\/12\/committee-on-arts-announced\/","url_meta":{"origin":72519,"position":3},"title":"Committee on arts announced","author":"harvardgazette","date":"December 21, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Harvard University President Drew Faust today (Dec. 21) announced the formation of a University-wide advisory committee on the arts, the Harvard University Committee on the Arts (HUCA).","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Arts &amp; Culture&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Arts &amp; Culture","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/section\/arts-humanities\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":114339,"url":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2012\/07\/fantasy-fairy-tales-happy-endings\/","url_meta":{"origin":72519,"position":4},"title":"Fantasy, fairy tales, happy endings","author":"harvardgazette","date":"July 23, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Sixteen teachers were selected to attend the National Endowment for the Humanities seminar course on fairy tales and fantasy literature at Harvard University. Maria Tatar, chair of the program in Folklore and Mythology, led the seminars.","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Arts &amp; Culture&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Arts &amp; Culture","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/section\/arts-humanities\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/071912_fairytaleste_291_605main.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/071912_fairytaleste_291_605main.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/071912_fairytaleste_291_605main.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":18057,"url":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2007\/06\/james-robert-hightower\/","url_meta":{"origin":72519,"position":5},"title":"James Robert Hightower","author":"harvardgazette","date":"June 14, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences May 1, 2007, the following Minute was placed upon the records.","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Campus &amp; Community&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Campus &amp; Community","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/section\/campus-community\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/105622744"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72519\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72519"},{"taxonomy":"format","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/gazette-formats?post=72519"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=72519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}