Terry Ralph Otten

Dr. Terry Ralph Otten, 87, of Dublin, OH, passed away peacefully on August 8, 2025.

He was born in Dayton, Kentucky on April 15,1938 to Howard and Alyce Otten. Terry attended Bellevue High School before earning his undergraduate degree from Georgetown College (1959), master’s degree from University of Kentucky (1961) and doctorate from Ohio University (1966). He began his distinguished 36-year career at Wittenberg University in 1966, quickly becoming a loved and respected fixture of the English Department. Known for his passion for literature and commitment to academic excellence, Dr. Otten received the Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1975 and was named CASE Ohio Professor of the Year for 1988 (and bronze medalist nationally). He served five, eventful years as chair of the English Department, ushering the department through a period of significant growth. He published prolifically, including the books The Deserted Stage (1972), After Innocence: Visions of the Fall in Modern Literature (1982), The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison (1989) and The Temptation of Innocence in the Dramas of Arthur Miller (2002), along with numerous articles in scholarly publications focusing on an unusual variety of literary movements, eras, and writers. While his work covered a range of writers as diverse as William Blake, Lewis Carroll, and Henrik Ibsen, the central theme within his body of scholarship was the loss of innocence, with its paradoxically redemptive possibilities of intellectual and spiritual human growth.

It was not merely his scholarship that covered such a varied terrain. In his personal life, he was as delighted by Saturday morning re-runs of The Three Stooges or an airing of Bride of Frankenstein as he was captivated by listening to a recording of Bach. He was notorious for showing up to pick-up games on the basketball courts at Wittenberg, undeterred by the youth and skills of the students he (often) trounced. He was a humble, quiet man with deep, intellectual curiosity, yes, also but one whose joyous, dead-on impersonation of Curly (his favorite of the Three Stooges) still rings in the ears of his now grown children. His beloved wife, Jane, has more than once attempted to give away the tshirts, coffee mugs and figurines of this icon that their daughter insisted on supplying her father. He was capable of compassionately soothing the overwhelmed students who sometimes called his home at night in tears, and also of delightedly knocking his children’s croquet balls to the far side of the yard in their frequent, competitive, and decidedly lopsided games. In his understated way, Terry Otten was a fiercely driven man, and one with a wicked sense of humor.

On the occasion of his retirement, former student Corrine Wohlford wrote one of many testimonials to Dr. Otten in which she recounted his recitation, (after mention of his own father’s death), of Dylan Thomas’ poem, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” “It was more than just rediscovering a poem,” Ms. Wohlford wrote. “It was about watching a poem transform my professor – my teacher, the esteemed critic – into a reader, into just a man before a poem.” Terry Otten, (who went with great dignity and courage into “That Good Night”), was a man forever before a poem: the poem of his boundless love for his wife; the poem of the landscape and mythology of New Mexico and the American Southwest; the poem of his devotion to his family and children; the poem of Bach’s Fugue in G Minor; the poem of a challenging pick-up game or 5k race; the poem of serious and brave scholarship; the poem of a particularly tricky prat-fall by a slapstick master. The whole world was a poem that could, at any turn, transform him, and he was perpetually the man before it, welcoming the transformation.

Terry, a devoted husband, loving father and grandfather, was married to his beloved wife Jane (nee Sharp) for 65 happy years, including 20 cherished post-retirement years in Santa Fe, NM. He is survived by Jane, children Julie and Keith (wife Maryellen Gordon), grandchildren June Otten, Toby Hattemer and Elliot Hattemer, and nephews and nieces Jenny Gonzalez (husband Bob Gonzalez), Christopher Otten, Lynn Sontag, Scott Sontag (wife Sherri Sontag), Deron Dorna (wife Robyn Dorna), and Sarah Dorna. He was preceded in death by his father Howard, mother Alyce, sisters Bonnie Dorna and Nancy Sontag, and brother Roger.