Elias L. Rivers, An Appreciation

Few American Hispanists of the post-war generation achieved professional prominence comparable to that of Elias L. Rivers. His accomplishments as scholar, teacher, and administrator are well documented in essays published in 1989 by former students Bruno M. Damiani and Ruth El Saffar and in obituaries that appeared following his death in December 2013 (see especially the note in El País by Serís and the note on the website of the Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas). What I propose in this essay is not another rehearsal of those accomplishments but rather an overview of the intellectual development of Elias Rivers, based on the seminars that I took with him at Johns Hopkins in the early seventies and on subsequent conversations in the U.S. and Spain. With no pretension of complete objectivity, I would like to explore his dialogue with the major critical movements of the second half of the twentieth century and underscore his significant role in the introduction of new approaches to Hispanic literary studies.

During his first two years of university work at the College of Charleston, Elias Rivers studied Latin and Greek, laying the foundation for a thorough grounding in the classics and an abiding interest in language in the broadest sense. (As a child he had learned Gullah, a local dialect prevalent in coastal areas of South Carolina, along with English.) Military service interrupted his college career, but language remained a dominant force in his life during the war years, as he was trained in Chinese at Georgetown University and then deployed at different sites in the Far East to put his language skills to practical use. When he resumed university work in 1946, this time at Yale, Elias continued his studies of Latin and Chinese while majoring in Spanish. Upon receiving his A.B. degree, he remained at Yale to pursue graduate studies in Spanish and French. During these years at Yale, Elias was exposed to New Criticism, the prevailing trend in American university circles, in the classes of his much-admired W. K. Wimsatt and also had the opportunity to study with two of Spain’s most distinguished scholars, Dámaso Alonso (whose poetry he would later translate into English) and Rafael Lapesa. Under their guidance, he began intensive study of what would become his major field of research through his entire career, the poetry of Spain’s Golden Age. Here we could say that Elias sharpened his skills in a philological approach to those texts, drawing heavily on the classical tradition in which he was already quite well versed. His first major publication, in 1955, derived from his Yale dissertation on the work of Francisco de Aldana.

After joining the faculty at Dartmouth College in 1952, Elias began to publish a series of seminal articles on the poetry of the Renaissance, among which “The Horatian Epistle and Its Introduction into Spanish Literature” and “The Pastoral Paradox of Natural Art” stand out as models of scholarship and would become obligatory reading for all scholars of the period. At the same time, Elias delved deeper and deeper into the work of Garcilaso de la Vega, preparing a ground-breaking edition of the poet’s complete works which would be published by Castalia in 1964 and again in 1968. Research for this publication was expedited by a Guggenheim Fellowship for the 1959–1960 academic year. Other publications from this period evidence a continuing interest in philology and the classical tradition, along with excursions into the work of Dante, the structure of the sonnet, and texts by Cervantes and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Simultaneously, Elias was moving through the professorial ranks at Dartmouth and became Professor in 1961. The following year he moved to Ohio State University, and in 1964 he became Professor at Johns Hopkins University.

During his tenure at Johns Hopkins, Elias began to engage with the work of Father Walter J. Ong, J. L. Austin, and John Searle. The distinction between written and oral modes, and its implications for genre theory, would become a major focus for much of his research during the next decade, as evidenced in...