Joel Elias Spingarn

Joel Elias Spingarn (May 17, 1875 – July 26, 1939) was an American educator, literary critic, civil rights activist, military intelligence officer, and horticulturalist. Biography Spingarn was born in New York City to an upper middle-class Jewish family. His younger brother was Arthur B. Spingarn. He graduated from Columbia College in 1895. He grew committed to the importance of the study of comparative literature as a discipline distinct from the study of English or any other language-based literary studies. Politics was one of his lifetime passions. In 1908, as a Republican he ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1912 and 1916, he was a delegate to the national convention of the Progressive Party. At the first of those conventions, he failed in his attempts to add a statement condemning racial discrimination to the party platform. He served as professor of comparative literature at Columbia University from 1899 to 1911. His academic publishing established him as one of America's foremost comparativists. It included two editions of A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance in 1899 and 1908 as well as edited works like Critical Essays of the Seventeenth-Century in 3 volumes. He summarized his philosophy in The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910. There he argued against the constraints of such traditional categories as genre, theme, and historical setting in favor of viewing each work of art afresh and on its own terms. Spingarn's criticism and aesthetical thought was deeply influenced by the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, with whom he was in correspondence since 1899. Croce had Spingarn's masterwork translated in Italian (La critica letteraria nel Rinascimento. Saggio sulle origini dello spirito classico nella letteratura moderna, trad. di Antonio Fusco, pref. di B. Croce, Laterza, Bari 1905). Their correspondence was published in Naples in 2001 (Carteggio Croce-Spingarn, a cura di Emanuele Cutinelli-Rendina, Istituto italiano per gli studi storici, Napoli, 2001).