René Wellek
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René Wellek (August 22, 1903—November 10, 1995) was a Czech-American comparative literary critic. Wellek, along with Erich Auerbach, is remembered as an eminent product of the Central European philological tradition.
Wellek was born and raised in Vienna, speaking Czech and German. He studied literature at the Charles University in Prague, and was active among the Prague School linguists there, before moving to teach in the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in 1935, now part of University College, London.
During World War II, Wellek relocated to America, first to the University of Iowa and then to Yale University. In the United States, he became a friend and advocate of the New Critics. With the critic Austin Warren, Wellek wrote the landmark volume Theory of Literature, one of the first works which systematized literary theory, rather than approaching criticism in a more ad-hoc fashion. Beginning in the 1960s, Wellek defended the New Critics against the condemnation of their work in the name of a structuralist-influenced literary theory. For this reason, he is sometimes thought of today as a conservative literary scholar. Wellek's final work was a lengthy, multiple-volume history of literary criticism.
