|
Richard Malcolm Weaver, Jr (March 3, 1910 – April 1, 1963) was an American scholar who taught English at the University of Chicago. He is primarily known as an intellectual historian, political philosopher and a mid-20th century conservative and as an authority on modern rhetoric. Weaver was briefly a socialist during his youth, a lapsed leftist intellectual (conservative by the time he was in graduate school), a teacher of composition, a Platonist philosopher, cultural critic, and a theorist of human nature and society. Described by biographer Fred Young as a "radical and original thinker,"〔Young 4〕 Richard Weaver's books ''Ideas Have Consequences'' and ''The Ethics of Rhetoric'' remain influential among conservative theorists and scholars of the American South. Weaver was also associated with the "New Conservatives," a group of scholars who in the 1940s and 1950s promoted traditionalist conservatism. ==Life== Weaver was the eldest of four children born to a middle-class Southern family in Asheville, North Carolina. His father, Richard Sr., owned a livery stable. After the death of her husband during 1915, Carolyn Embry Weaver supported her children by working in her family's department store in her native Lexington, Kentucky. Lexington is the home of the University of Kentucky and of two private colleges. Despite his family's straitened circumstances after the death of his father, Richard Jr. attended a private boarding school and the University of Kentucky. He earned an A.B in English during 1932. The teacher at Kentucky who most influenced him was Francis Galloway. After a year of graduate study at Kentucky, Weaver began a master's degree in English at Vanderbilt University. John Crowe Ransom supervised his thesis, titled ''The Revolt against Humanism'', a critique of the humanism of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. Weaver then taught one year at Auburn University and three years at Texas A&M University. During 1940, Weaver began a Ph.D. in English at Louisiana State University (LSU), whose faculty included the rhetoricians and critics Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, and the conservative political philosopher Eric Voegelin. While at LSU, Weaver spent summers studying at Harvard University, the University of Virginia, and the Sorbonne. His Ph.D. was awarded during 1943 for a thesis, supervised first by Arlin Turner then by Cleanth Brooks, titled ''The Confederate South, 1865-1910: A Study in the Survival of a Mind and a Culture''. It was published during 1968, posthumously, with the title ''The Southern Tradition at Bay''. After one year's teaching at North Carolina State University, Weaver joined the English department at the University of Chicago, where he spent the rest of his career,〔Young 3-4〕 and where his exceptional teaching earned him that university's Quantrell Award during 1949. During 1957, Weaver published the first article in the inaugural issue of Russell Kirk's ''Modern Age''. Weaver spent his academic summers in a house he purchased in his ancestral Weaverville, North Carolina, very near Asheville. His widowed mother resided there year-round. Weaver traveled between Chicago and Asheville by train. To connect himself with traditional modes of agrarian life, he insisted that the family vegetable garden in Weaverville be plowed by mule. Every August the Weaver family had a reunion which Richard regularly attended and not infrequently addressed. Precocious and bookish from a very young age, Weaver grew up to become "one of the most well-educated intellectuals of his era".〔Scotchie 4〕 Highly self-sufficient and independent, he has been described as "solitary and remote",〔Young 1〕 as a "shy little bulldog of a man".〔Nash 84〕 Lacking close friends, and having few lifelong correspondents other than his Vanderbilt teacher and fellow Agrarian Donald Davidson, Weaver was able to concentrate on his scholarly activities. During 1962, the Young Americans for Freedom gave Weaver an award for "service to education and the philosophy of a free society".〔Scotchie x〕 Shortly before his sudden death in Chicago, Weaver accepted an appointment at Vanderbilt University. According to his tombstone, Dr. Weaver died on April 3, 1963. During 1964, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute〔Nash 82〕 created a (graduate fellowship ) in his memory. In 1983, the Rockford Institute established the annual Richard M. Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Richard M. Weaver」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|