max nänny

 
Max Nänny, 1932 - 2006
One of the founding fathers of IAWIS / AIERTI

Photo Martin Heusser

Max Nänny, Emeritus Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Zurich, lost his battle to cancer and died on Saturday, February 4, 2006 at Zurich University Hospital. As one of the founding fathers of our organization, his commitment to the study of verbal/visual interaction was instrumental in establishing Word & Image Studies as an academic discipline in the early 1990s.

Born in Zurich on September 30, 1932, he attended school in Zurich and studied English at the Universities of Zurich and Aberdeen. He received his doctorate from the University of Zurich in1958 with a thesis on John Dryden's rhetorical poetics. Like many other academics in Switzerland he began his career as a teacher at Gymnasium - he taught English at Kantonsschule Wetzikon between 1958 and 1970. In 1962/63 he spent a year as a post-doctoral fellow at Silliman College, Yale, doing research for his Habilitation (or 'second major book') on Ezra Pound. In 1969 Max Nänny became a Privatdozent with his study on Pound entitled Poetics for an Electric Age. In 1970 he was appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Zurich and three years later he was offered the chair of Modern English Literature at the University of Fribourg, in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. In 1977 he returned to Zurich as Professor of English and American Literature.

Max Nänny soon made a name for himself as an astute researcher - both nationally as well as internationally - and as an exceptionally talented and respected academic teacher. His broad research interests led to the publication of over one hundred articles on a great variety of topics, ranging from Lawrence Sterne to W. H. Auden and from Orality to Menippean Satire. His main concern, however, was with Modernism (Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, Cummings) and, in recent years, with Verbal/Visual Studies. One of the founding fathers of IAWIS/AIERTI, Max Nänny's research on the visual dimension of literary texts (concrete poetry, iconicity) contributed substantially to the development of Word & Image Studies as an internationally recognized study field. In 1990 he organized the memorable second international IAWIS / AIERTI conference at the University of Zurich. However, Max Nänny was not only very active academically in Zurich but also nation-wide. He was the president of SAUTE (Swiss Association for University Teachers of English) between 1982 and 1984 and the founder in 1984 of SPELL (Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature), an important publication for junior academics.

Max Nänny remained active after his retirement in 1997, publishing and attending conferences, until a few months ago. His death is felt deeply and leaves a great void not only in the academic world, particularly in the field of Word & Image Studies, but also among his colleagues, friends and family. The University of Zurich loses not only an internationally respected academic and a charismatic teacher but also an exceptional human being. His wide-ranging knowledge, his devotion to his family, his affectionate, open and un-dogmatic ways, his wry humor and, not least, his proverbial modesty have impressed and shaped an entire generation of students and academics.

(Martin Heusser)