Robert Kaske


Robert Earl Kaske was an American professor of medieval literature. Kaske studied liberal arts at Xavier University and was called to service for the Reserve Officers' Training Corps during his undergraduate study. He obtained a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1950. He continued in academia, teaching English, where he became an assistant professor and then an associate professor, also earning a Guggenheim Fellowship.
In 1964, Kaske began working at Cornell University. He founded a medieval studies graduate program and earned another Guggenheim Fellowship in 1977. Throughout his career, he published over 60 articles. Kaske was known for rejecting the "New Criticism" school of thought, arguing that medieval poetry should be read in context. Kaske married twice and had two children. He died of a brain tumor in 1989.

Early life and education

Robert Kaske—who went by Bob—was born on 1 June 1921 in Cincinnati, Ohio. His parents were Herman C. Kaske, a postal clerk with the United States Postal Service, and Ann Rose Kaske. Robert Kaske attended the boys prep school Elder High School, graduating from the modern English course in 1938.
In 1938 Kaske also matriculated at Xavier University, studying liberal arts. In his junior year he was inducted into Alpha Sigma Nu, and played Peter Dolan in a school production of Father Malachy's Miracle. At the end of the year he was chosen "Host" of Mermaid Tavern, a student literary club. He fulfilled that role as a senior, and was also named editor in chief of The Athenaeum, an undergraduate literary paper, while cofounding a society for students interested in philosophical research. That year Kaske also placed seventh in an intercollegiate writing contest, and appeared in another play, Whispering in the Dark. Kaske graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts on 3 June 1942.
Kaske had joined the Reserve Officers' Training Corps in his first semester at Xavier, and even before his graduation was ordered to active service. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the army's field artillery on 25 May 1942, and ordered to report to Fort Thomas for a physical examination and assignment, with a furlough to account for his June commencement. Speaking to Kaske and 24 others, the commencement speaker, Archbishop John T. McNicholas, stated "ay I assure the Second Lieutenants of this graduating class that the Archdiocese of Cincinnati is proud of them. It is happy to know that Xavier University is not only teaching theoretical patriotism, but that it is actually serving our country in the greatest crisis in its history." Kaske served in the Pacific as a platoon leader and company commander, including on Black Sand Beach in Hawaii.
After the army Kaske resumed studies, this time at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As at Xavier, Kaske wrote for a student paper, Factotum. He received his Masters from UNC, and in 1950, his Ph.D.

Career

Kaske's hiring as an English instructor at Washington University in St. Louis was announced in April 1950, before his June dissertation defense. His work there included studies of Dante Alighieri, and in 1952 he was promoted to assistant professor. Kaske subsequently taught at Pennsylvania State University. He was later hired at UNC, where he began his associate professorship on 1 September 1958. Two years later, he was awarded a grant by the American Council of Learned Societies to work on a book, provisionally titled The Heroic Ideal in Old English Poetry. In 1961 Kaske was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study heroism and the hero in Old English poetry, and also served as secretary of the Modern Language Association's Middle English group. From 1962 to 1963, he worked at the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
In 1964 Kaske joined Cornell University, where he remained for the rest of his life. At Cornell he founded a medieval studies graduate program, which his colleagues later said "soon came to be recognized as the foremost program of its kind in North America." In 1968—a year in which he was first listed in Who's Who in America—he was awarded another grant by the American Council of Learned Societies, this time to travel to England and search for the sources of imagery in poems by the unknown Gawain Poet. Another grant by the organization followed in 1971, for further research into the heroic ideal in Old English poetry, and that year Kaske also participated in a symposium on Geoffrey Chaucer held at the University of Georgia. During 1972–73 he was a Faculty Fellow of the university's Society for the Humanities, and in 1974 he was named the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, succeeding. Three years later, he again won a Guggenheim Fellowship, to undertake research on the sourced and methodology for the interpretation of medieval imagery.
Kaske published more than 60 articles throughout his career. One of his primary contributions was to reject the "New Criticism" school of thought that argued that medieval poetry should be read in a contextual vacuum, culminating in a 1988 book, Medieval Christian Literary Imagery: A Guide to Interpretation. As his colleagues wrote a year later, "while this has achieved its due acknowledgment as an indispensable tool for medievalists, no mere book can recreate the rich life its contents enjoyed in the animated version purveyed by Bob himself over three decades."

Personal life

In January 1944 Kaske, then 22 and home on leave, married Mildred Mae Reinerman, a 21-year-old bookkeeper. The two had a son, David L. Kaske married again in 1958, to Carol Vonckx, an English scholar who herself became a professor at Cornell. They also had a son, Richard; at the time of his death, Kaske also had three grandchildren. He died of a brain tumor on 8 August 1989, at his Ithaca home on North Quarry Street. A funeral was held on the 26th, at Ithaca's Immaculate Conception Church, and a memorial service on 21 October at Sage Chapel, with contributions suggested to the university library's Dante-Petrarch or Icelandic collections.

Publications

Articles

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