Friday, September 20, 2019
In Touch
Edmund Wilson (1895-1972), "Christian Gauss as a Teacher of Literature," The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle
of the Twenties and Thirties (1952; rpt. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1979), pp. 3-26 (at 6):
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I have never known anyone like him in any academic community. He gave the impression of keeping in touch, without the slightest effort—he must have examined all the printed matter that came into the university library—with everything that was going on everywhere, as well as everything that had ever gone on. It used to amuse me sometimes to try him out on unlikely subjects. If one asked him a question about the Middle Ages, one absolutely got the impression that he had lived in Europe then and knew it at firsthand.
