Robert Scholes 1929-2016

Robert Scholes, an inventive and visionary scholar of modern culture, passed away peacefully at his home on 9 December 2016. He wrote or edited some forty books on topics like the history of storytelling, the creativity of science fiction, the complexity of language, and the enduring value of figures like James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. These works were translated into several different languages and studied in classrooms around the world. Scholes did some of the earliest archival work on James Joyce, co-wrote with Robert Kellogg what remains the standard study of narrative history, played a key role in legitimizing science fiction as a genre worthy of serious study, helped create the legendary semiotics program at Brown University, and co-founded the Modernist Journals Project, an early and enduring digital humanities initiative. He wrote textbooks about poetry and fiction as well as literary theory and the reasons why we study literature. He won nearly every honor the field offers, including a Mellon professorship at Brown, a Guggenheim, the Modern Language Association's award for distinguished service, and the National Council of Teachers of English award for research. He held honorary doctorates from universities in the United States as well as France and was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998 and president of the Modern Language Association in 2004.

This long and distinguished list of books and awards, however, does little to describe the life and impact of a man whose work helped to shape careers and classrooms around the world. Scholes was an agile thinker and able writer who never lost touch with the basic elements of the profession, even in the era of high theory and academic superstars. Some of his greatest books, including Textual Power and Protocols of Reading, urged us to understand the importance of literacy and the slipperiness of language. He offered, for example, a legendary interpretation of a profane bumper sticker, showing just how complex the everyday world around us can be. He wrote or edited ten textbooks on writing and poetry, storytelling and rhetoric, precisely because he believed that teaching lay at the very heart of things. Indeed, some of his final books, including the Rise and Fall of English, urged scholars to turn away from the minutiae of theory in order to re-engage with the basic skills of grammar, logic, and rhetoric in the classroom.

Despite his enormous accomplishments, Scholes was a modest, even quiet, man. Borrowing a favorite phrase from Joyce, he called himself "a lazy idling little schemer" in school, who managed to pass through Yale without taking anything too seriously. After college, he was an active-duty naval reserve officer who served in the Korean War and lost part of his hearing thanks to the deafening noises of the guns aboard the USS Helena. The Navy, however, allowed him to indulge his love of the sea. An avid sailor for much of his life, he managed to strike up what became a close friendship with Ursula Le Guin when he showed her a picture of the sailboat he had named the Lookfar—a name taken from her novel, A Wizard of Earthsea.

After leaving the Navy, he entered the doctoral program in English at Cornell University where he read and studied broadly with what he said was great energy, but little aim. Evincing his trademark modesty, in fact, he said that when it was time to write a dissertation he had few ideas about what to do and was saved by a mentor who suggested that he try his hand at editorial work. Cornell had recently acquired a huge archive of papers by James Joyce, and Scholes took on the task of cataloging and editing them. The resulting works-—The Cornell Joyce Collection (1961) and The Workshop of Daedalus (1964)—became cornerstones of the rising field of Joyce studies and still provide essential insights into how the Irish writer set about his earliest work. After finishing his degree at Cornell in 1959, Scholes moved briefly to the University of Virginia, where he taught a course on William Faulkner that was attended by the...