Visiting English Professor Values Literary Change

Each year a substantial portion of the Summer School's teaching is done by visiting professors from other colleges and universities around the country. One such man here this summer is John J. Enck, professor of English at the University of Wisconsin.

Dr. Enck's special field is Elizabethan literature: his Ph.D. thesis was on Ben Jonson, and his course at Harvard will be English S-123, a study of several Shakespearian plays. Dr. Enck also reads widely in modern poetry (Wallace Stevens is his favorite).

But he has little praise for the centuries in-between-the years which produced Samuel Johnson, Tennyson, Wordsworth, and Keats. He does not hestitate to explain why it is that two periods many years apart should arouse similarly favorable responses. Both of the periods he prefers, the Elizabethan and the modern, are known for their experimentation with literary form. And in Dr. Enck's eye, this is a quality in literature to be desired above all others. He is one of those scholars for whom the study of literature is sometimes best described as the study of change.

A simple and brief comment he offers on Dryden (1631-1700) illustrations Dr. Enck's approach. It is better, he feels, to view Dryden in terms of the 15th century--and thus as an innovator--rather than in the light of the 19th--an era whose perspective leads us to think of Dryden almost as a literary curiosity.

The summer interlude at Harvard fits conveniently into Dr. Enck's plans. He took a leave of absence from Wisconsin this year, spending the fall in London at the British Museum and the spring in Washington D. C. at the Folger Library. Cambridge will be his last stop before he returns to the Middle West, which he plans to do at the end of the Summer session.

Dr. Enck finds Wisconsin some-what more diverse than Harvard; he studied here as a graduate student in the late forties. There are more students, at Wisconsin, for one thing; also, there are more elective courses open to each student.

A resident of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Dr. Enck spent his undergraduate years at Philadelphia's Haverford College (class of 1943). Immediately after graduation he went into the Army (as an enlisted man), eventually serving in the Allied Forces headquarters in North Africa.

He received a Master of Arts Degree from Harvard in 1947 and a Ph.D. in 1951. His doctoral dissertation on Jonson--written under Harry Levin, still a professor of English at Harvard--was later reprinted in book form under the title "Jonson and the Coming Truth."

From Harvard, Dr. Enck went directly to Wisconsin. He became an associate professor in 1956, and a full professor shortly thereafter