DAVID GROSSVOGEL

GROSSVOGEL--David. David Isaac Grossvogel taught at Columbia University, Harvard, and Cornell University where he was the Goldwin Smith Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies. Phi Beta Kappa at Berkeley, recipient of Fulbrights in Grenoble and Paris, a CRB Fellowship in Brussels, the Clark Research Award at Harvard, a Guggenheim in Paris, a fellowship at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis and at the Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies in Oxford. Witty, ironic, subtle and discrete, he was the loving, strong, and devoted partner to Jill for 50 years, adored uncle to Alyson Lyon, outspoken colleague and influential mentor for hundreds of students. No one was a more attentive listener. No one thought outside the box the way he did, unrestrained by convention and limits set by others. A pivotal moment was the 1970 founding of Diacritics, an avant-garde journal of contemporary criticism featuring interviews with Claude Levi-Strauss, Ernst Gombrich, Jacques Derrida, Ionesco, A.R. Ammons, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Felix Guattari, debates with Michel Foucault, George Steiner, Ihab Hassan, Edward W. Said, work in progress by Tzvetan Todorov, Harold Bloom, Rene Girard, and Paul de Man. Engagement with the Longshoremen's Union while he was a student was the first of David's lifelong commitment to social justice. His editorial in the Berkeley newspaper was picked up by The Daily Worker and nearly got him expelled. When his Cornell colleagues and students were going through the anguish of the late 60s, he co-authored Divided We Stand: Reflections on the Crisis at Cornell and was a source of strength for his students during the Vietnam War years, campus strikes, and resistance to investments in South Africa. David wrote on diversity of form in Genet, Claudel, Robbe-Grillet, Sartre, Fellini, Visconti, Bunuel, Polanski, Ghelderode, Crommelynk, and Kafka. The 1982 Symposium and Retrospective that he organized in honor of Michelangelo Antonioni was a unique and powerful tribute. His article"The Coercing of Vision "(FilmQuarterly May 2007) analyzed Michael Haneke's film Cache and won David widespread critical acclaim. From his earliest books, David always articulated a new vision: TheSelf-Conscious Stage, Four Playwrights and a Postscript, The Limits of the Novel, film criticism for Diacritics, Mystery and its Fictions: From Oedipus to Agatha Christie, Dear Ann Landers, Changing Channels: America in TV Guide, Vishnu in Hollywood: The Changing Image of the\ American Male, Scenes in the City: Film Visions of Manhattan Before 9/11, Didn't You Used to be Depardieu?, Marianne and the Puritan: Transformations of the Couple in French and American Films. His final year of teaching was as Director of EDUCO (Emory, Duke, and Cornell) in Paris. But the publication of his first novel in French, Le Journal de Charles Swann, remains his most meaningful achievement; critics praised an American writer who had so mastered the stylistic register of Proust. His second novel, Mariage New-Yorkais, was also published in Paris, recounting the vagaries of a dysfunctional New York Jewish family. His powerful, feminist play about the three ages of Colette was followed by one about Paul Robeson. David's richly varied life on two continents left its mark on his final work: Etre Americain. So like David Grossvogel to write his memoires in French and title them "Being American." No ordinary man. Services are private. Services are being handled by Cremation Society of Illinois, 773-281-5058 or www.cremation-society.com