Photo I (Karl and Jean at Home)

Jean and Karl in Brooklyn, by Joseph Viscomi

Karl Kroeber, Teacher, April 2009

Madeline Dangerfield-Cha
Columbia College 2011

At the end of the spring semester in 2009, a friend asked me to write a short article about Professor Kroeber for an on-campus publication.  Karl and I sat down for a formally informal interview after our Blake seminar (I say “our” rather than “his” because he truly considered it to be ours) one morning and he gave me some juicy tidbits of his humor and insight.  I wrote what can be read below, and sent it to my friend.

Remembering Karl Kroeber

Martin Meisel
Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Colleague and friend

There were many sides to Karl—too many to represent in this moment of remembrance—so those of us now privileged to say a word will doubtless speak only to some of them. For this abundance, the scholar’s part in him can be seen as a kind of touchstone. Karl was a scholar who kept reinventing himself—inventing whole new fields of study while he was at it. He didn’t want to be pinned down, limited, circumscribed, in what he could do. I had a message from him once about a sign that had delighted him on a London street: “Refuse to Be Put in this Basket.”

Tribute to Karl Kroeber

A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff
Professor of English, University of Illinois at Chicago

I am deeply honored that Jean Kroeber asked me to talk about my work with Karl during his editorship of Studies in American Indian Literatures and his scholarship in that field. My husband, Gene Ruoff, and I owe our careers to him.

Remembrance

Seth Rosenbaum
Columbia College 2004
PhD student in English at Harvard

I would like to begin by thanking the Kroeber family for allowing me to speak today. They’ve taken a risk. Karl taught thousands of undergraduates, and I am humbled to stand before you as their representative. I hope to convey who Karl was for me, what he became, and how he continues as part of my life. Karl was my teacher; he became an advisor, mentor, model, and a friend. Despite Karl’s death, I relieve him of none of the aforementioned responsibilities. For the last ten years I’ve leaned heavily on Karl’s wisdom and friendship, and I am only beginning to understand the depth of the debt I owe him.

Remembrance

Joseph Viscomi
Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Student and friend

I took the photograph of Karl on the Commemoration booklet on March 21, 2009, at his home at the tail end of a lovely dinner. It is a good likeness; it captures his wonderful laugh, twinkling eyes, and overall joie de vivre.

Remembrance of Karl Kroeber

Nicholas Dames
Associate Chair of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

William James wrote that the human brain ceases to be elastic at age 29. Karl was proof that this cannot possibly be true.

The Once and future father

Katharine Wiley, daughter

I hope you are all comfortable, because I’m afraid I can be short only in height. I am going to speak of my father and myself, and there just is no way I can be brief on that topic.

One could tell a million wonderful stories about Karl Kroeber, but how does one ever do justice to a man who understood that so often the real power of stories is in the spaces between the words, the deepest love in the things not said?

Karl Kroeber, or living and dying in the present

In a world replete with self-promotion and self-pity, Kroeber worked—quietly and unpretentiously—to remind us of how things could be.

By Philip Petrov. Published in the Columbia Spectator, 11 November 2009. Re-posted by kind permission of the editors.

Columbia mourns loss of Karl Kroeber

By Alexa Davis. Published in the Columbia Spectator, 11 November 2009. Re-posted by kind permission of the editors.

The Remarkable Career of Karl Kroeber

Excerpt from the Columbia University English Department Update, Vol. 1, No. 1, fall 2009:

Former students confirm the challenging and provocative atmosphere of the Kroeber classroom experience.

Romanticism with a Difference: The Recent Criticism of Karl Kroeber (1991)

By Gene W. Ruoff. Published in boundary 2, 18:1 (spring 1991), pp. 226-37. Re-posted by kind permission of the author.

Ruoff, Romanticism with a Difference (boundary 2, 1991).pdf

Profile of a Contemporary: Karl Kroeber (1973)

By Frank Jordan, Department of English, Miami University. Published in The Wordsworth Circle, 4:3 (summer 1973), pp. 187-91. Re-posted by kind permission of the editor.

Karl Kroeber is the author of three books and of more essays and reviews than one can easily count or remember. The earliest essay is dated 1957; the first book was published in 1960. If I read the signs correctly the three books will soon be four and the essays and reviews still more numerous than at present.[1]

Address to Columbia College students elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Society, 18 May 2009

I begin by apologizing to the parents of today’s honorees, because some things I say may distress you. If it helps, I am a parent of three children, so I understand the financial sacrifices you have undergone for the past 4 years. I am also aware that these splendid young adults whose accomplishments we celebrate, you knew just a few years ago as adolescents – and adolescence has been described as extended familial suffering for no discernible reason. Finally, as a teacher I have one overriding commitment: to speak only the truth as I see it to your children – and I think you deserve the same respect.

An interview with Karl Kroeber (fall 2009)

Published in the newsletter of the Department of English & Comparative Literature of Columbia University, fall 2009. Re-posted by kind permission.

The Bwog interview, December 2006

Adam Katz and Josh Schwartz, “Interview: Karl Kroeber.” Bwog.com, December 14, 2006. Re-posted by kind permission of the editor.

Biographical Note

Karl Kroeber was born in Oakland, California on 24 November 1926, and died on 8 November 2009 in the house in Brooklyn, New York that he shared for nearly four decades with his wife of fifty-six years, Jean Taylor Kroeber.

Photos II (by Karl)

View of the Green Mountains, from the house in Hampton, New York, taken by Karl; courtesy of Arthur Kroeber

Second View of the Green Mountains, from the house in Hampton, New York, taken by Karl; courtesy of Joseph Viscomi

Photos III (the young Karl)

The Kroeber family, Kishamish, 1931 (from left to right: Theodore, Clifton, Ursula, Alfred, Karl, Theodora)

In the navy, 1945

The intrepid explorer, at Kishamish, 1956

Photos IV (at Quivey Hill, New York)

Karl Jones and Karl Kroeber, Woodmen, July 2005

Trickster, 2006

Karl and Jean, August 2007

Photo V (at Quivey Hill)

Karl at Quivey Hill, summer 2008 (courtesy of Jean Kroeber)

Photo VI (at Quivey Hill)

Karl with grandchildren Keith and Erika Wiley at Quivey Hill, 2008 (courtesy of Jean Kroeber)

Selected bibliography

(Includes only book-length works; articles are too numerous to mention)

Romantic narrative art (Wisconsin, 1960)

The artifice of reality: poetic style in Wordsworth, Foscolo, Keats, and Leopardi (Wisconsin, 1964)

Styles in fictional structure: the art of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot (Princeton, 1971)

Romantic landscape vision: Constable and Wordsworth (Wisconsin, 1975)

British Romantic art (California, 1985)

Romantic fantasy and science fiction (Yale, 1988)

Retelling/rereading: the fate of storytelling in modern times (Rutgers, 1992)

Ecological literary criticism: Romantic imagining and the biology of mind (Columbia, 1994)

Artistry in Native American myths (Nebraska, 1998)

Make believe in film and fiction: visual vs. verbal storytelling (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)

Edited volumes:

(Karl Kroeber and John O. Lyons) Studying poetry: a critical anthology of English and American poems (Harper and Row, 1965)

Backgrounds to British Romantic literature (Chandler, 1968)

(Karl Kroeber and William Walling) Images of Romanticism: verbal and visual affinities (Yale, 1978)

Traditional literatures of the American Indian: texts and interpretations (Nebraska, 1981 [first ed.], 1997 [second ed.])

(Karl Kroeber and Gene W. Ruoff) Romantic poetry: recent revisionary criticism (Rutgers, 1993)

American Indian persistence and resurgence (Duke, 1994)

(Karl Kroeber and Clifton B. Kroeber) Ishi in three centuries (Nebraska, 2003)

Native American storytelling: a reader of myths and legends (Blackwell, 2004)