Memorial notice for Gerald Gillespie

Gerald Gillespie 1933-2025

            The stimulating conversation and disciplinary imagination of Gerald Ernest Paul Gillespie, president of the Association in 1994-1997, come vividly to mind as the Association mourns his passing. Comparatists know his enthusiasm, his organizational zeal, and his commitment to sustaining the Association as an open house for discovery and debate. His love for the “motley crew” of comparatists, as he called us, was contagious.

            A scholar’s publications retrace an intellectual journey. Originally a scholar of German Romanticism, he treated that field as a place of connections and used it to develop a rich network of analogies of style, genre, and theme. Starting from works of literary history, Daniel Casper von Lohenstein's Historical Tragedies (1966) and a rediscovery of German Baroque Poetry (1971), he found a vein he would continue mining with his translations of the pseudonymous The Nightwatches of Bonaventura (1971, 2014), a dark piece of Gothic comedy from 1804, and Ludwig Tieck’s rewritten fairy tale Der gestiefelte Kater (Puss-in-Boots) (1971). Tieck’s false naïveté and genuine irony captured the kinds of incongruity that prompt both laughter and reflection (very much in character for this translator), and in 2013 Professor Gillespie issued a revised edition of the translation with commentary, Ludwig Tieck’s ‘Puss-in-Boots’ and the Theater of the Absurd. The melting of the “fourth wall” characteristic of that play also transpires in some of Gillespie’s writings on our profession: see his essays in By Way of Comparison: Reflections on the Theory and Practice of Comparative Literature (2004) and Rebuilding the Profession (ed. Dorothy Figueira, 2020). The collection Garden and Labyrinth of Time: Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Literature (1988) opens a variety of perspectives on those centuries of restless invention, a line taken further in “Scientific Discourse and Postmodernity: Francis Bacon and the Empirical Birth of ‘Revision’,” an essay included in Early Postmodernism: Foundational Essays (ed. Paul Bové, 1995). The labyrinth motif, denoting the infinite turns and returns of discovery, grounds his Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context (2003, revised edition 2010), a study for which the Joycean tags “Echoland” and “Here Comes Everybody” are suited: here learning and taste bring clarity to complexity. Readers will also want to consult Professor Gillespie’s essays in the CHLEL volumes on Romantic Drama and Romantic Prose Fiction (1994, 1998), his contributions to The Picaresque: A Symposium on the Rogue’s Tale (1994), Narrative Ironies (1997) and Contextualizing World Literature (2015), and the many articles in journals and Festschriften where his Joycean scope of learning and his Goethean serenity can be found. Many minds and careers have been touched by his writing, his teaching, his constructive engagement, and his friendship.

Haun Saussy, November 2025