Robert Folkenflik

Professor Robert Folkenfilk, an accomplished and influential Johnson scholar, a versatile critic of eighteenth-century British literature and culture, a highly respected editor, a beloved teacher and mentor, and an enormously discerning, erudite, warm and conversable pillar of the eighteenth-century scholarly community, died on July 20, 2019, after a brief illness. He had recently turned eighty and was Erik A. Dickson Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Irvine, where he had taught for decades after earning his PhD from Cornell and a stint at the University of Rochester. A key shaper of UC Irvine’s emergent identity, he remained dynamically engaged in its intellectual and social life to the end. He leaves his wife Vivian, a specialist in nineteenth-century French literature and noted translator of Madame de Stael; a son, David; David’s wife Jesse Baker; and three young granddaughters. A beloved daughter, Nora, was tragically killed by vehicular homicide in 1995; the Folkenfliks endowed several scholarships and awards in her name, and these have long played a decisive role in shaping and sustaining the intellectual lives of the most vulnerable.

A fearless swimmer of the Pacific, Professor Folkenflik will be remembered for his love of life. Much of his scholarship taught us how to honor and celebrate his own life, since he was an authority on memoir, biography, and autobiography — all genres whose modernization he tracked in a series of important articles initiated by his important monograph, Samuel Johnson, Biographer (Cornell 1978; reprinted in 1979). This book remains one of the most frequently cited studies of both Johnson and eighteenth-century life-writing; it developed a strong approach to the historical and experiential contexts of self-narration and changed the ways eighteenth-century scholars think about the relationship between lives and letters. It also established Professor Folkenflik as an authoritative Johnsonian, one whose deep learning and ecumenical spirit made him uniquely able to mediate gracefully between competing views of Johnson’s politics, ethos, and aesthetics.

Professor Folkenflik was also an expert on the eighteenth-century visual arts, especially where they cross paths with literary history. Favored with the keen eye, tracking instinct, and tenacity of a bloodhound, he pursued canonical portraits from the Rupert Barber renderings of Swift to Joshua Reynolds’s “Blinking Sam.” He brought to all of these undertakings not only deep learning and consummate wit but a lively sense of flourish and gesture and, perhaps above all, contagious delight. A 1998 piece tracking the “images and afterimages” of Charlotte Charke pioneered the rediscovery of a long-overlooked figure; other work on Charke brought her life writing to light for a generation of scholars. In a spirit that the irrepressible Charke would have appreciated, Professor Folkenflik wore his expertise lightly; one of his favorite research stories involved his cold-calling of Charkes presently living in London so as to discover how to pronounce a possible ancestor’s last name. (Think “chalk,” not “shark.”)

Professor Folkenflik was extraordinarily civic-minded, not just a fixture at every ASECS convention but a lively conduit for intellectual exchange across a variety of subfields that included not just Johnson, portraiture,  and the assorted genres of life-writing but history and criticism of the novel. Some of his most important contributions to the field were user-friendly yet deeply annotated editions of A Tale of a Tub, Tristram Shandy, and (with Barbara Laming Fitzpatrick) Sir Launcelot Greaves. He was a go-to reviewer and review editor and was also responsible a landmark essay collection, The Culture of Autobiography (1993). He also served for some time as general editor of Irvine Studies in the Humanities.

At Irvine, Professor Folkenflik will be remembered for his unstinting generosity, impartiality, and special care of the young. Indeed, even after retirement, he was the deserving recipient of highly competitive mentorship award.  Throughout a career that turned out to be lifelong, he worked tirelessly behind the scenes to launch the careers of many graduate students, continuing to guide them deep into their professional lives while also remaining a fast friend, ally and advisor to junior colleagues at home. His own leafy coastal home was a treasure trove of rare books reflecting his special interest in eighteenth-century British narrative.

With his colleague Murray Krieger, Professor Folkenflik led the initiative to house the University of California’s Humanities Research Institute at Irvine; HRI remains a major driver of cross-disciplinary dialogue and research in the humanities. He himself held prestigious fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations and the British Academy and maintained an international profile via visiting positions at the University of London, the University of Konstanz, and the University of Barcelona.

One of Professor Folkenflik’s last pet projects was The Double Falsehood; in 2014 he hosted a landmark conference at UCLA’s Clark Library on a play sometimes partially attributed to Shakespeare but just as often held to be the work of the much-maligned Lewis Theobald. This controversial and enigmatic piece was at once a fitting focus for Professor Folkenflik’s talent for turning disagreement into sociable and progressive critical exchange and an ironic one, since falsehood, single or double, is the very last thing his legion friends and admirers would have associated with him.  Unlike Samuel Johnson’s dubious biographical subject Richard Savage — described by Johnson as “not such much a good man, as a friend to goodness” — Robert Folkenflik was both a good man and a friend to goodness. He leaves an unfillable void at a university that will long remember — and praise — his sterling ethos, his intellectual acumen, his optimism, his generosity, his unfailing graciousness, and his truly social imagination.

Jayne Lewis, Professor
English, UC Irvine