Robert Langbaum
Encyclopedia
Robert Woodrow Langbaum is an American Author and a University of Virginia
James Branch Cabell prof. English and Am. lit., 1967—1999, prof. emeritus, 1999—
Robert began his undergraduate studies at Cornell, with tuition scholarships, in 1940. After America’s entry into World War II, Robert left at the end of his sophomore year to study Japanese at New York University
. In 1942 he enlisted in the US Army Military Intelligence to be trained as a Japanese translator and interrogator, achieving the rank of 1st Lieutenant. After Japan’s surrender in 1945, he with a small group from his unit were sent to Japan to find documents for war crimes trials and to bring back 2nd copies of Japanese library books for the Library of Congress. In 1947 he returned to Cornell for a semester to obtain his B. A. degree. He then, with the help of the GI bill, began studies at Columbia University
for his M. A. and PhD in English Literature, where he was influenced by Lionel Trilling
and Jacques Barzun
. He obtained his PhD in 1954 while working as an Instructor at Cornell.
whom he admires as poet and critic. He objects, however, to Eliot’s redrawing of the literary tradition as beginning with the early seventeenth-century witty poets and the witty side of Shakespeare. Eliot names this tradition a poetry of wit that continues into the early eighteenth century and on into the twentieth century poetry. He skips over the nineteenth century as an interruption. Robert instead defines a longer tradition beginning with the “romantic” side of Shakespeare (e.g. Hamlet), the romantic nineteenth century into the twentieth century. He shows that Eliot’s early poetry (“Prufrock,” The Waste Land
) is romantic, and that his poetry as a whole, despite his claim of objectivity, is mainly autobiographical. Robert uses the developing dramatic monologue as an example of what he calls in his first chapter, “Romanticism as a Modern Tradition.” The Poetry of Experience has been reprinted in several paperback editions, in a Spanish translation (1996), and is now an e-book.
In 1964 Robert published an edition of Shakespeare’s The Tempest
with his introduction. Since The Tempest is Shakespeare’s last play, Robert in his introduction sees it as “the appropriate statement of age, of the writer who having seen it all and mastered all techniques can teach us that the profoundest statement is the lightest and that life, when you see through it, is gay, tragicomically gay.” In that same year Robert published The Gayety of Vision: Isak Dinesen’s Art. Isak Dinesen (pen name for Karen Blixen) was also an old writer. She was 49 when in 1934 she published her first volume of stories, Seven Gothic Tales, which in its lightness of surface covering serious content demonstrates the tragicomic vision. Out of Africa
, the book for which she is best known, was also published in 1934, though it recollects a much earlier period, the many years in which she managed a coffee farm in Kenya. This recollected experience, which omits many details of what really happened, gives the book its artistic shape.
In his collection of essays, The Modern Spirit: Essays on the Continuity of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Literature, Robert has an essay called “The New Nature Poetry,” which argues that nature poetry is still alive but in a new guise. “Our nature philosophy” he writes, “has been made not only by Darwin but by Freud and Frazer. It connects our mind and culture to the primeval ooze.” This explains the effort of twentieth century poets try to be as nonanthropomorphic as possible, using animals rather than Wordsworthian landscapes for their symbols of nature. Wordsworth omits from his nature poetry, nature’s most powerful force, sexuality. Wordsworth portrays unconsciousness, but not the sexually charged primeval unconsciousness represented by animals. This argument is continued by the title of Robert’s second collection of essays, The Word from Below (1987). Quoting Blake’s “Does the Eagle know what is in the pit?/ Or wilt thou go ask the Mole?,” he suggests that the energy of the pit can propel men/women to their highest achievements.
Robert’s The Mysteries of Identity (1977) traces the nineteenth and twentieth century engagement with that mysterious coherence called the self. The best way to describe the book is by quoting the Table of Contents. Part I, THE ROMANTIC SELF. Chapter 1, Wordsworth: The Self as Process. Part II, LOSS OF SELF. Chapter 2, Arnold: Waning Energy. Chapter 3, Eliot: The Walking Dead. Chapter 4, Beckett: Zero Identity. Part III, RECONSTITUTION OF SELF: YEATS THE RELIGION OF ART. Chapter 5, Exteriority of Self. Chapter 6, The Self as a Work of Art. Chapter 7, The Self as God. Part IV, RECONSTITUTION OF SELF: LAWRENCE THE RELIGION OF LOVE. Chapter 8, Identity and Sexuality. Chapter 9, The Rainbow: The Way Through Hope. Chapter 10, Women in Love: The Way Through Doom.
Thomas Hardy in Our Time (1995) is Robert’s last published book; he is now writing memoirs. Robert argues that in his fiction, Thomas Hardy
encapsulates Victorian accomplishments, but he carries them a step farther into the twentieth century. He retains the complex plots and rounded characterizations of Victorian fiction. But adds to Victorian social criticism a new intensity and an expansion of subject matter in, for example, his frank treatment of sexuality and the subjection of women through sexuality (Tess, 1891). Jude the Obscure
(1895) is Hardy’s gloomiest and most revolutionary novel. Tess is revolutionary, but not as much as Jude in which Hardy lashes out at all the social arrangements of his time. Jude at the beginning is an intelligent, idealistic working-class young man who studies at home for admission to the University of Christminster (Oxford). In his innocence, he is seduced by Arabella and deceived into marriage by Arabella, the daughter of a pig farmer. Arabella leaves for Australia where she marries again, then returns to keep popping up in Jude’s life. Jude is rejected by Christ minster because of his social class. At Christminster he meets there Sue Bridehead, a “modern” woman, intelligent, independent and therefore, according to the bias of the time, low in sexual energy. Since Jude is already married, they live together unmarried. When the landlady learns of this, she evicts them—a trauma for their oldest child who kills the other children and himself. Sue could have prevented the tragedy by assuring the child of her love, but Sue lacks instincts. Jude dies; Sue sacrifices herself in penance; Arabella survives. As a Darwinian Hardy ironically has to admire Arabella’s brash sexuality, unblinking realism, as contrasted to the idealism of Jude and Sue, and fitness for survival.
The unfavorable reception of Jude caused Hardy to return to his first love, poetry where he could safely express his atheism, feminism, Darwinism, and his opposition to hunting--safely because so few people read poetry. In his several volumes of verse, Hardy encapsulates Victorian poetry but passes on a plain diction and irony that has influenced many twentieth-century poets. There is much discussion as to whether Hardy is a major or minor poet. Robert argues that Hardy’s poetry is too good to be dismissed as minor, but that Hardy’s really major poetry is to be found in his novels.
, Stanley Loomis
, Robert Kurka
, E. D. Hirsch, Robert Heilbroner
, Jason Epstein
, Vladimir Nabokov
,
University of Virginia
The University of Virginia is a public research university located in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States, founded by Thomas Jefferson...
James Branch Cabell prof. English and Am. lit., 1967—1999, prof. emeritus, 1999—
Biography
Robert Langbaum, English literature educator and literary critic, was born February 23, 1924, son of Murray and Nettie Langbaum (Moskowitz). Robert married Francesca Levi Vidale, November 5, 1950; one child Donata Emily, 1956. Robert was born in Brooklyn NY, and grew up in Forest Hills, Queens. From 1936 to 1940, he attended Newtown High School where in 1939 he met Francesca, who with her family immigrated from Italy after the Fascist government began persecuting Jews.Robert began his undergraduate studies at Cornell, with tuition scholarships, in 1940. After America’s entry into World War II, Robert left at the end of his sophomore year to study Japanese at New York University
New York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
. In 1942 he enlisted in the US Army Military Intelligence to be trained as a Japanese translator and interrogator, achieving the rank of 1st Lieutenant. After Japan’s surrender in 1945, he with a small group from his unit were sent to Japan to find documents for war crimes trials and to bring back 2nd copies of Japanese library books for the Library of Congress. In 1947 he returned to Cornell for a semester to obtain his B. A. degree. He then, with the help of the GI bill, began studies at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
for his M. A. and PhD in English Literature, where he was influenced by Lionel Trilling
Lionel Trilling
Lionel Trilling was an American literary critic, author, and teacher. With wife Diana Trilling, he was a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to the Partisan Review. Although he did not establish a school of literary criticism, he is one of the leading U.S...
and Jacques Barzun
Jacques Barzun
Jacques Martin Barzun is a French-born American historian of ideas and culture. He has written on a wide range of topics, but is perhaps best known as a philosopher of education, his Teacher in America being a strong influence on post-WWII training of schoolteachers in the United...
. He obtained his PhD in 1954 while working as an Instructor at Cornell.
Books
Robert’s first book, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (1957), takes issue with T. S. EliotT. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
whom he admires as poet and critic. He objects, however, to Eliot’s redrawing of the literary tradition as beginning with the early seventeenth-century witty poets and the witty side of Shakespeare. Eliot names this tradition a poetry of wit that continues into the early eighteenth century and on into the twentieth century poetry. He skips over the nineteenth century as an interruption. Robert instead defines a longer tradition beginning with the “romantic” side of Shakespeare (e.g. Hamlet), the romantic nineteenth century into the twentieth century. He shows that Eliot’s early poetry (“Prufrock,” The Waste Land
The Waste Land
The Waste Land[A] is a 434-line[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its...
) is romantic, and that his poetry as a whole, despite his claim of objectivity, is mainly autobiographical. Robert uses the developing dramatic monologue as an example of what he calls in his first chapter, “Romanticism as a Modern Tradition.” The Poetry of Experience has been reprinted in several paperback editions, in a Spanish translation (1996), and is now an e-book.
In 1964 Robert published an edition of Shakespeare’s The Tempest
The Tempest
The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1610–11, and thought by many critics to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone. It is set on a remote island, where Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place,...
with his introduction. Since The Tempest is Shakespeare’s last play, Robert in his introduction sees it as “the appropriate statement of age, of the writer who having seen it all and mastered all techniques can teach us that the profoundest statement is the lightest and that life, when you see through it, is gay, tragicomically gay.” In that same year Robert published The Gayety of Vision: Isak Dinesen’s Art. Isak Dinesen (pen name for Karen Blixen) was also an old writer. She was 49 when in 1934 she published her first volume of stories, Seven Gothic Tales, which in its lightness of surface covering serious content demonstrates the tragicomic vision. Out of Africa
Out of Africa
Out of Africa is a 1985 romantic drama film directed and produced by Sydney Pollack, and starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep. The film is based loosely on the autobiographical book Out of Africa written by Isak Dinesen , which was published in 1937, with additional material from Dinesen's book...
, the book for which she is best known, was also published in 1934, though it recollects a much earlier period, the many years in which she managed a coffee farm in Kenya. This recollected experience, which omits many details of what really happened, gives the book its artistic shape.
In his collection of essays, The Modern Spirit: Essays on the Continuity of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Literature, Robert has an essay called “The New Nature Poetry,” which argues that nature poetry is still alive but in a new guise. “Our nature philosophy” he writes, “has been made not only by Darwin but by Freud and Frazer. It connects our mind and culture to the primeval ooze.” This explains the effort of twentieth century poets try to be as nonanthropomorphic as possible, using animals rather than Wordsworthian landscapes for their symbols of nature. Wordsworth omits from his nature poetry, nature’s most powerful force, sexuality. Wordsworth portrays unconsciousness, but not the sexually charged primeval unconsciousness represented by animals. This argument is continued by the title of Robert’s second collection of essays, The Word from Below (1987). Quoting Blake’s “Does the Eagle know what is in the pit?/ Or wilt thou go ask the Mole?,” he suggests that the energy of the pit can propel men/women to their highest achievements.
Robert’s The Mysteries of Identity (1977) traces the nineteenth and twentieth century engagement with that mysterious coherence called the self. The best way to describe the book is by quoting the Table of Contents. Part I, THE ROMANTIC SELF. Chapter 1, Wordsworth: The Self as Process. Part II, LOSS OF SELF. Chapter 2, Arnold: Waning Energy. Chapter 3, Eliot: The Walking Dead. Chapter 4, Beckett: Zero Identity. Part III, RECONSTITUTION OF SELF: YEATS THE RELIGION OF ART. Chapter 5, Exteriority of Self. Chapter 6, The Self as a Work of Art. Chapter 7, The Self as God. Part IV, RECONSTITUTION OF SELF: LAWRENCE THE RELIGION OF LOVE. Chapter 8, Identity and Sexuality. Chapter 9, The Rainbow: The Way Through Hope. Chapter 10, Women in Love: The Way Through Doom.
Thomas Hardy in Our Time (1995) is Robert’s last published book; he is now writing memoirs. Robert argues that in his fiction, Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy, OM was an English novelist and poet. While his works typically belong to the Naturalism movement, several poems display elements of the previous Romantic and Enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural.While he regarded himself primarily as a...
encapsulates Victorian accomplishments, but he carries them a step farther into the twentieth century. He retains the complex plots and rounded characterizations of Victorian fiction. But adds to Victorian social criticism a new intensity and an expansion of subject matter in, for example, his frank treatment of sexuality and the subjection of women through sexuality (Tess, 1891). Jude the Obscure
Jude the Obscure
Jude the Obscure, the last of Thomas Hardy's novels, began as a magazine serial and was first published in book form in 1895. The book was burned publicly by William Walsham How, Bishop of Wakefield, in that same year. Its hero, Jude Fawley, is a working-class young man who dreams of becoming a...
(1895) is Hardy’s gloomiest and most revolutionary novel. Tess is revolutionary, but not as much as Jude in which Hardy lashes out at all the social arrangements of his time. Jude at the beginning is an intelligent, idealistic working-class young man who studies at home for admission to the University of Christminster (Oxford). In his innocence, he is seduced by Arabella and deceived into marriage by Arabella, the daughter of a pig farmer. Arabella leaves for Australia where she marries again, then returns to keep popping up in Jude’s life. Jude is rejected by Christ minster because of his social class. At Christminster he meets there Sue Bridehead, a “modern” woman, intelligent, independent and therefore, according to the bias of the time, low in sexual energy. Since Jude is already married, they live together unmarried. When the landlady learns of this, she evicts them—a trauma for their oldest child who kills the other children and himself. Sue could have prevented the tragedy by assuring the child of her love, but Sue lacks instincts. Jude dies; Sue sacrifices herself in penance; Arabella survives. As a Darwinian Hardy ironically has to admire Arabella’s brash sexuality, unblinking realism, as contrasted to the idealism of Jude and Sue, and fitness for survival.
The unfavorable reception of Jude caused Hardy to return to his first love, poetry where he could safely express his atheism, feminism, Darwinism, and his opposition to hunting--safely because so few people read poetry. In his several volumes of verse, Hardy encapsulates Victorian poetry but passes on a plain diction and irony that has influenced many twentieth-century poets. There is much discussion as to whether Hardy is a major or minor poet. Robert argues that Hardy’s poetry is too good to be dismissed as minor, but that Hardy’s really major poetry is to be found in his novels.
Works
- The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition,(New York, Random House) 1957 (Spanish trans. 1996) ISBN 0701118520
- The Gayety of Vision: A Study of Isak Dinesen's Art (New York, Random House),1965, (Danish trans. 1965), ISBN 0226468712
- The Modern Spirit: Essays on the Continuity of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Literature,(New York, Oxford University Press) 1970, ISBN 0701116153
- The Mysteries of Identity: A Theme in Modern Literature, (New York, Oxford University Press),1977 ISBN 0195021894
- The Word From Below: Essays on Modern Literature and Culture, (Madison, U. of Wisconsin Press),1987, ISBN 0299111849
- Thomas Hardy in Our Time,(New York, St Martin's Press), 1995 ISBN 0312164092
- Editor with an introduction: The Tempest (Shakespeare), (New York: Penguin Group), 1964 ISBN 0451527127
- Editor with an introduction: The Victorian Age: Essays in History and in Social and Literary Criticism, (New York, Fawcett World Library),1967 ISBN 0897330552
Lectures
- “The Mysteries of Identity in T. S. Eliot’s Play s,” Johns Hopkins U. (1971), U. of Kansas (1972)
- “Is Guido Saved? The Meaning of Browning’s Conclusion to The Ring and the Book,” MLA, Browning Society, Boston (1971)
- “The Art of Victorian Literature,” U. of Minnesota (1974), Stonybrook U., Duke U., U. of North Carolina (1976)
- Lectures at Wordsworth Conferences (1976, 1977, 1978)
- ”Transformations of Identity in Yeats,” U. of Iowa (1977)
- “Strange Points of View,” Browning Birthday Lecture, Baylor U., Texas (1978)
- “The Epiphanic Mode in Wordsworth’s Poetry,” U. of Texas, U. of Missouri (1978), U. of Geneva, Switzerland (1979)
- “The Art of Victorian Literature,” U. of Zurich, Lausanne, Switzerland (1979)
- BBC Broadcast on Isak Dinesen, London, UK (1979)
- “Frost and Hardy”, MLA, Robert Frost Society, (1980)
- “Hardy, Victorianism, Modernism,” CUNY, New York City (1982)
- “The Poetry of Experience 25 Years Later,” U. of Toronto, Canada (1982)
- “Ideas of Leadership in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus,” U. of Virginia (1982)
- “Pound and Eliot,” U. of Michigan (1983)
- “Victorian Religious Crisis,” Broadcast for Radio Canada (1984)
- “Can We Still Talk about The Romantic Self?” MLA (1984)
- “Ezra Pound and T. S Eliot: Friendship and Strife,” U. Kent State (1985)
- “Changes of Style, Thought and Feeling in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry,” Eliot Centennenial St. Louis, Mo. and Smithsonian, Washngton, D. C. (1987)
- “Browning and Twentieth Century Poetry,” Conference Browning in Venice, Venice, Italy (1989)
- “Modern, Modernist, and Postmodernist Literature,” Texas A&M U., Baylor U., Texas (1988), U. of Verona, Italy (1989)
- lectured at James Joyce conference, China, (1990)
- “My Remiscences of Isak Dinesen,” U. of Wisconsin, (1992)
- “D. H. Lawrence and the Modernists,” Lawrence Conference, U. of Paris (1992)
- “Jude the Obscure,” U. of Georgia, (1995)
Awards
- Who's Who in America to 2012
- Phi Beta Kappa
- fellow Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral SciencesCenter for Advanced Study in the Behavioral SciencesThe Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences is an American interdisciplinary research body in Stanford, California focusing on the social sciences and humanities . Fellows are elected in a closed process, to spend a period of residence at the Center, released from other duties...
, Stanford, Calif., 1961-62 - GuggenheimGuggenheimGuggenheim may refer to:* Benjamin Guggenheim* Charles Guggenheim* Davis Guggenheim* Guggenheim Building* Guggenheim family* Guggenheim Fellowship* Guggenheim Museum * Harry Frank Guggenheim* John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation...
fellow, 1969-70 - Senior fellow National Endowment for the HumanitiesNational Endowment for the HumanitiesThe National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent federal agency of the United States established by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. The NEH is located at...
, 1972-73 - American Council of Learned SocietiesAmerican Council of Learned SocietiesThe American Council of Learned Societies , founded in 1919, is a private nonprofit federation of seventy scholarly organizations.ACLS is best known as a funder of humanities research through fellowships and grants awards. ACLS Fellowships are designed to permit scholars holding the Ph.D...
, grantee, 1961, 75-76 - fellow Clare Hall, Cambridge U., UK, 1978
- fellow Center Advanced Study, U. of Virginia, 1982
- resident scholar, Rockefeller FoundationRockefeller FoundationThe Rockefeller Foundation is a prominent philanthropic organization and private foundation based at 420 Fifth Avenue, New York City. The preeminent institution established by the six-generation Rockefeller family, it was founded by John D. Rockefeller , along with his son John D. Rockefeller, Jr...
, Bellagio,Italy, 1987. - U.S. Information Service Lecturer, Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong, 1988
Friends of note
John B. CobbJohn B. Cobb
John B. Cobb, Jr. is an American United Methodist theologian who played a crucial role in the development of process theology. He integrated Alfred North Whitehead's metaphysics into Christianity, and applied it to issues of social justice.-Biography:John Cobb was born in Kobe, Japan in 1925 to...
, Stanley Loomis
Stanley Loomis
Stanley Loomis was the author of four books on French history: Du Barry , Paris in the Terror , A Crime of Passion , and The Fatal Friendship . Paris in the Terror was named one of the “books of the century” by the University of California, Berkeley...
, Robert Kurka
Robert Kurka
Robert Frank Kurka was an American composer, who also taught and conducted his own works.Kurka was born in Cicero, Illinois. He was mostly self-taught, though he studied for short periods under Darius Milhaud and Otto Luening, receiving his M.A. degree from Columbia University in 1948...
, E. D. Hirsch, Robert Heilbroner
Robert Heilbroner
Robert L. Heilbroner was an American economist and historian of economic thought. The author of some twenty books, Heilbroner was best known for The Worldly Philosophers , a survey of the lives and contributions of famous economists, notably Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard...
, Jason Epstein
Jason Epstein
Jason Epstein is an American editor and publisher.A 1949 graduate of Columbia College of Columbia University, Epstein was hired by Bennett Cerf at Random House, where he was the editorial director for forty years. He was responsible for the Vintage paperbacks, which published such authors as...
, Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...
,