John Paul Riquelme

He will be missed by many, all over the world. He is survived by his wife Marie-Anne Verougstraete, his children, Ione Bargy, Victor Riquelme and Louis Riquelme; his granddaughter Olive Riquelme, and his stepchildren, Yann and Elen Lamour.

With the passing this week of John Paul Riquelme, the modernist community has suffered not just a great loss, but many losses in one. For the greatness of John Paul Riquelme lay precisely in the astonishing versatility of his likewise astonishing powers of integration. He brought to an exceptionally wide range of intellectual involvements a passion and a proficiency for forging connections among the elements of the tasks at hand and among those fellow laborers taking them up. As a literary scholar, John Paul Riquelme produced landmark studies of modernist authors in the British, Irish and American traditions: From Teller and Tale in Joyce’s Fiction, which initiated a decisive stylistic turn in Joyce studies; through Harmony of Dissonances: T.S. Eliot, Romanticism and Imagination, which unearthed a bridge between the poet’s individual talent and a largely disavowed phase of his tradition; to his most recent projects, “Modernist Gothic: Wilde to Beckett” and “Wild(e) Modernism: The Making of a Precursor,” the latter of which traces the genre-bending influence of the titular Irish modernists in a rich mosaic of twentieth-century authors, including Morrison, Carter, Faulkner, Woolf, Ellison, Conrad, and Rhys. Building on the volume Gothic Modernism: Essaying Dark Literary Modernity, these recent studies sustain and consolidate Riquelme’s place as the foremost exponent of the unexpected overlap and interchange in the representational strategies of “high” modernism and the pop cultural genres of Gothic and, later, science fiction. In the pursuit of this line of inquiry, he helped to hatch the field we know today as LLC Victorian-Early 20th-Century English from the remains of the Victorian and the origins of the Modernist era. His scholarship has thus redelineated the architecture of literary periodization in a fundamental way.

But if you asked John Paul Riquelme what his primary contribution to our collective enterprise might be, he would respond, without hesitation, “I’m an editor.” And a surpassingly fine and prolific editor he was. His Bedford Critical Editions of Dracula and Tess of the D’Urbervilles and his Norton Critical Edition of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man set the standard by which all future editions of these novels will be measured. They also served to bring together scholars of different generations, viewpoints, theoretical adherences and areas of expertise in a joint endeavor to illuminate each text and elaborate its context. Riquelme performed the same integrative role in a series of special journal issues, a number of which put contemporary literary critics in touch with one another to consider the critical legacy of their eminent forbears.

John Paul Riquelme’s indefatigable efforts to cultivate the field of literary modernism and the scholars committed to working it did not end with the published word. Long the head of the Modernism series at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center, he would arrange for speakers and conversations on the latest approaches to all manner of topics. As his coadjutor, Paige Reynolds, remarked upon his leadership, “The Modernist project of Mahindra was so successful because John Paul remained perpetually open to new ideas and new perspectives that would reconfigure his thinking. He was never anxious but always enthusiastic at the prospect of being unsettled in his viewpoints.” That thoroughgoing intellectual hospitality readily translated into the hospitality of mentorship, of which Mahindra proved an extension. Since his untimely passing, I have heard from numerous people in our profession about the debt they owed to his engagement with their work, his counsel, his solicitude, his generosity, and, above all, his support. In this regard, John Paul demonstrated that one can contour an area of study, leave a positive intellectual legacy, even bend the course of academic history not only as an outstanding scholar, a peerless editor and an energetic impresario—though he was all of these things—but also as an admirable human being. To say he will be missed, personally and professionally, is a massive understatement. Goodbye John Paul, and as you would say, for one last time, “with a handshake.”

Joseph Valente

UB Distinguished Professor

University at Buffalo

For the Modernist Studies Association (MSA)

Fond memories and expressions of sympathy may be shared at www.StanetskyBrookline.com