Krieger, Murray, 1923-2000

Murray Krieger was born in Newark, New Jersey on November 23, 1923 and died in Laguna Beach, California on August 5, 2000. His older brother was Leonard Krieger, who became one of the leading intellectual historians in the United States. Krieger attended local high schools, and his undergraduate work at Rutgers University was interrupted by service in the armed forces in World War II, including a stint in India.

After graduating with an A.M. degree from the University of Chicago in 1948, Krieger taught for one year at Kenyon College's School of English, famous for its School of Criticism and for publishing the primary organ of New Criticism, the Kenyon Review, edited by John Crowe Ransom. Krieger also studied there under Allen Tate and René Wellek in the Summer School of Criticism. He returned to graduate work at Ohio State University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1952.

From 1954 to 1958 he was a professor of English at the University of Minnesota, where he rose to the rank of Associate Professor. He was a Professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana from 1958-1963. In 1963 he was appointed to the M.F. Carpenter Chair in Literary Criticism at the University of Iowa in Iowa City--the first such position in the United States. He, along with others, had started a post-war struggle against institutional resistance to theory and criticism that was intended to create a place in departments of literature for literary criticism that is well grounded in theory. Krieger thereby played a leading role in establishing literary criticism and theory as a legitimate discipline within literature programs. He also actively participated actively in the dissemination of theory in the United States and abroad.

Murray Krieger joined the faculty at the University of California at Irvine (UCI) in December 1966. His goal was to create a program that would enable graduate students in English and Comparative Literature to have a Ph.D. concentration or emphasis in Critical Theory. In 1977 this was expanded and made available throughout the School of Humanities. At about the same time a Focused Research Program in Contemporary Critical Theory was created for faculty who specialized in this area. The faculty group did not adhere to any particular school of Critical Theory, but rather reflected a diverse espousal of various areas: the current Anglo-American school of criticism, poststructuralist or deconstructionist thought, politically influenced theory, psychoanalytically-based theory, and reader-reception theory. Krieger was instrumental in the creation of UCI's Critical Theory Program, for which he served as founding director. This program was the precursor to the Critical Theory Institute and the Critical Theory Emphasis within the School of Humanities. The Institute has sponsored colloquia and seminars by noted theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, Paul de Man, Edward Said, and Judith Butler.

In 1974 Krieger attained the rank of University Professor, a position that carries with it the right to teach and lecture at all campuses in the University of California system. He was the first humanist to attain this rank, as well as the first University Professor from the Irvine campus (and the only one, as of 2001).

Together with Hazard Adams, Krieger founded the School of Criticism and Theory at UCI in 1975, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, as a summer school for junior faculty and advanced graduate students. Krieger and Adams were initially the co-directors; Krieger served as sole director from 1978-1981. The school was shaped by a board of senior fellows, including such notable figures as M.H. Abrams, Northrop Frye, René Girard, Geoffrey Hartman, and Edward Said. The roster of teaching faculty for 1978 included, in addition to Krieger, Geoffrey Hartman, Wolfgang Iser, Fredric Jameson, Louis Marin, and Hayden White, each representing divergent theoretical stances in both their courses and the weekly colloquia in which they all participated, with Krieger acting as a commentator. The School brought nationwide recognition to UC Irvine and demonstrated the ascendance of theory. The School moved in 1981 to Northwestern University, with Krieger continuing as director for that year. It later moved to Dartmouth College and, as of 2000, resides at Cornell University. Over a thousand junior faculty and students have attended the School, and some eventually became the leading critics of their generation.

UC administrators were considering the establishment in the early 1980s of a Humanities Research Institute (HRI) that would serve all the campuses but be housed at a particular institution. Murray Krieger's stature, persuasive powers, and dynamism played a large part in the selection of the Irvine campus as the home of the HRI. Krieger, though an active scholar at the time, was appointed its first administrator and established its focus on collaborative, interdisciplinary research in many areas.

In the late 1970s Murray Krieger was instrumental in aiding the UC Irvine Library in the acquisition of the René Wellek Collection of the History of Criticism, housed in the Department of Special Collections and Archives. This collection includes all the books on which Wellek based his magisterial History of Modern Criticism 1750-1950 . In 1981 the Critical Theory Program inaugurated an annual lecture series called "The Wellek Library Lectures," in which a leading theorist presents his or her latest views. Krieger was the Wellek lecturer in 1988. In 1987, with the cooperation and assent of Library administrators, he proposed the idea of establishing the Critical Theory Archive to collect manuscripts from leading theorists. In the ensuing years the Archive has acquired the personal papers of Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Stanley Fish, Ihab Hassan, Wolfgang Iser, Murray Krieger, J. Hillis Miller, René Wellek, and others.

Krieger was also the driving force for the appointment at Irvine in 1987 of such luminaries in literary studies and theory as J. Hillis Miller, Jacques Derrida, Wolfgang Iser, and Jean-François Lyotard. In a long, productive, and illustrious career, Murray Krieger played all the roles of an academic leader and public intellectual by corresponding with many academics, writers, and critics, here and abroad; by service in professional organizations; and through lectures at numerous Universities. But it is through his books and the students he taught that he has made his most significant contribution to the prominence of literary or critical theory in academia.

Throughout his career Murray Krieger confronted current issues in critical theory and his travels through the terrain of theory have been a reflection of the dominant trends. Influenced formally into aesthetics by his philosophy teacher and collaborator Eliseo Vivas, Krieger's first work was a book he edited with Vivas on the problems of aesthetics. He retained a concept of the aesthetic throughout his career and developed and refined it as a close reader of Immanuel Kant and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Like his teacher René Wellek, he was in favor of aesthetic evaluation. One of his last theoretical writings, entitled "My Travels with the Aesthetic," is a detailed intellectual autobiography.

The post-war critical theory scene was still dominated by New Criticism and Existentialism when Krieger--who was personally acquainted and studied with New Criticism figures such as John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, and others--assessed this school with his first book, The New Apologists for Poetry (1956). His second book, The Tragic Vision (1960), is a clear manifestation of his existentialist tendencies, one that is nevertheless tied to his organicist aesthetic. Later, at a time when Northrop Frye dominated the field of criticism, Murray Krieger addressed Frye's views in A Window to Criticism (1966) and in his introductory essay to a symposium he organized at the English Institute entitled Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism (1966). Without a doubt, Krieger was the earliest and strongest defender of literary theory as a discipline in America. As John Sutherland said in the Times Literary Supplement in 1987: "And for the past twenty years it [UC Irvine] has had in its English department Murray Krieger--a scholar who was hyper-theoretical before it was fashionable to be even mildly theoretical."

On the other hand, he was also a critic of the excesses of theory, and saw early on the failure of theory to define its limits; he never believed that theory was a self-sufficient discipline. Literary or critical theory, in his view, was in no way privileged, but was part of the language of theory or theoretical discourse. Theory, for him, attempts to provide a rational structure for critical practice, for acts of criticism, and thus is ontologically committed to a world of texts, to poems. There is no criticism or theory without literature. Krieger defended the work of fiction, the poem, the book, against structuralist, poststructuralist, and deconstructive attacks originating from predominantly Continental sources. According to him, a reconstituted poetics can arise out of a deconstruction of metaphysics. Poetry as a self-conscious fiction is a special form of language, one which demonstrates a verbal presence in its affirmation of its illusory nature. As Krieger said: "Illusion, after all, is what my poetics is about." A poem may be about absence, but it is itself a presence whose self-consciousness renders it immune to metaphysical attacks. Works of fiction are closed and they ought to be valued for being closed. In all this theorizing, Murray Krieger never neglected the poem, the work of fiction, or the arts (including opera). He wrote perceptively and extensively on literary works of every period and genre since the Renaissance, but especially on Shakespeare's sonnets and the Renaissance lyrics.