Bruce Wardropper, In Memoriam

BRUCE WARDROPPER, INMEMORIAM MARGARET R. GREER Duke University My own awareness of Bruce Wardropper's importance in our field began when I was a student in Alex Parker's classes on Golden Age drama, in which several of his articles were required reading. I first saw him in person at the Congreso Internacional sobre Calderón y el Teatro del Siglo de Oro in Madrid in June of 1981; many heads in the auditorium turned as he and Nancy entered, and to explain the stir, someone whispered in my ear, "That's Bruce Wardropper and his wife Nancy." When I first came to Duke to give a lecture—on Calderón—in 1991, after his retirement, I was acutely aware ofhis presence in the audience, although he did not pose any ofthe tough questions his expertise would surely have made possible. Six years later, when I moved to Duke, he and Nancy invited me for a memorable lunch at their home, at which we talked a great deal about his interest in Golden Age Spanish poetry, and he kindly gave me his copy of Amezúa y Mayo's edition of María de Zayas's Novelas amorosas. Students preparing their preliminary PhD exams here still rely on his anthology of Golden Age poetry. Since his death, I have learned considerably more about the important role Bruce played at Duke. As well as being a distinguished member of the Romance Languages department, its first holder of a named chair position, he was also instrumental in the creation of the Literature program , and an important voice in bringing Fred Jameson to lead that new venture that helped to build Duke's strong reputation in the Humanities. In the end, however, most students will probably remember him most for his teaching and for his deeply humanistic scholarly rigor. At a recent 459 460BCom, Vol. 56, No. 2 (2004) Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies conference at Los Angeles, I met a young woman who had been a double major here in economics and Spanish and, having loved his class on the Quixote, approached Bruce to ask his advice about what she should do to continue her studies in Spanish, to which he replied. "Learn Latin and Greek." She became a medievalist, one of so many students whose intellectual careers Bruce Wardropper shaped. TERESAAND CHRISTOPHER SOUFAS Tulane University The passing ofBruce Wardropper is certainly to be lamented by scholars everywhere. Even more impressive than his books and edited volumes is the great body of articles—many of them more like short books, well over 100 and perhaps closer to 200—that he produced with astonishing regularity until his retirement. Bruce Wardropper was a yardstick by which to measure one's own commitment to the profession. For those who were Wardropper's students, however, the loss of a great teacher is to be lamented perhaps the most. Wardropper never lectured; all his classes were strictly forums for discussion . He would typically begin new texts by reading a short passage from the work to be discussed, something that he was particularly bothered by or at a loss to explain and let the discussion take shape from there. Students quickly caught on that he expected his audience to have digested beforehand the conventional wisdom about a given class topic-class time was not for things available in the library—and to be ready to question that wisdom, to take the discussion a step forward. Equally important was his conviction that one of the most important parts ofgraduate study was to become prepared to publish one's ideas. As valuable as the insights taken from his courses was the consciousness he instilled in his students that the enterprise of scholarship is to engage in position-taking via the printed word. Every class exercise, from short composition to term paper, was always judged from the perspective ofits worthiness for publication. His criticism was that of an editor of a scholarly journal, and his commentary—which often extended to three or four Wardropper461 single-spaced typed pages—would invariably be directed toward describing what further steps needed to be taken to get the assignment into publishable form. The...