Norman O. Brown
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Norman Oliver Brown (1913–2002) was an American scholar, born in El Oro, Mexico. His father was an Anglo-Irish mining engineer, and his mother a Cuban of Alsatian and Cuban origin. He was educated at Clifton College, then Balliol College, Oxford (BA, MA, Greats; his tutor was Isaiah Berlin), and the University of Wisconsin (PhD, Classics). During the Second World War, he worked for the OSS as a specialist on French culture. After the war, he took a position as Professor of Classics at Wesleyan University. His initial work in classics betrayed a Marxist bent (in his commentary to Hesiod's Theogony and his first monograph, Hermes the Thief). Following his disenchantment with real politics in the wake of the 1948 presidential election, he turned to a deep study of the works of Freud, described in his book Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History. A synthesis of Freudian and Marxist thinking, with Nietzsche thrown into the mix, can be identified as the origin of his Love's Body, a book which adapted an unorthodox and creative writing style, approaching a language that was as much poetry as prose. In the late 1960s, following a stay at the University of Rochester, he moved on to the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he was named Professor of Humanities.
Brown was a highly popular professor at all of these institutions, known to both friends and students as "Nobby". The range of his interests and studies at Santa Cruz broadened to include James Joyce (Brown's Closing Time juxtaposes Finnegans Wake with the Scienza Nuova of Giambattista Vico), re-encounters with classical poetry and mythology, including scholarly-poetic responses to Propertius, and to Ovid's Metamorphoses, an engagement with American modernist poetry (especially Robert Duncan and Louis Zukofsky) and a deep study of Islam. Many of his later writings were collected in the anthology Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis. Brown's academic friendships were interdisciplinary and included the historians Christopher Hill, Carl Schorske, and Hayden White as well as philosophers Stuart Hampshire and Herbert Marcuse. Brown's association with John Cage dated from his Wesleyan years and was fruitful to both scholar and composer. Brown died in Santa Cruz, in 2002.
[edit] Books:
Hermes the Thief: the Evolution of a Myth (1947)
Hesiod: Theogony (1953)
Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (1959)
Love's Body (1966)
Closing Time (1973)
Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis (1991)
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