Background
Ruttkowski, Wolfgang Victor was born on February 5, 1935 in Hirschberg, Germany. Son of Victor Leopold and Ursula (Drobnig) Ruttkowski.
researcher German language educator
Ruttkowski, Wolfgang Victor was born on February 5, 1935 in Hirschberg, Germany. Son of Victor Leopold and Ursula (Drobnig) Ruttkowski.
Born in 1935 in Silesia (now Poland), he began his studies in 1961 at the University of Vienna studying theatre arts (he also attended the directors class of the Burgtheater under Krauss) and at the University of Göttingen, mainly German and comparative literature under Wolfgang Kayser. He obtained his Doctor of Philosophy on the subject of cabaret ballads in Germany (Das Literarische Chanson in Deutschland) after which he was invited by Göttingen University for an oral examination, after which he also received the German Doctor.Phil.
He has written four works of comparative literature and psychology of art, now considered standards of their genre. After the latter's unexpected death, he received a German Academic Exchange Service-scholarship at McGill university in Montreal/Canada (1963-1965). The idea of this topic, formerly never dealt with in a scholarly fashion, came from his nightly performances in cabarets and nightclubs, where he sang German and French cabaret songs and American jazz standards.
His dissertation was published by Francke in Bern and immediately made his name in the scholarly world.
He accepted a guest professorship at Tokyo University (1972-1974). There he found time to pursue his interest in "audience-related" literature, of which the cabaret song is the most obvious example.
But he also studied all types of artists, from the first Greek authors to contemporary international psychological literature, combining this interest with psychology of stratification of personalities. This led to the publication of his second and third works: Literary Genres (Die Literarischen Gattungen, Francke, 1968) and Types and Strata (Typen und Schichten, Francke, 1978).
At this time (1972-1974) he was teaching at New York University.
With six colleagues he published a 7-language (German-English-French-Italian-Spanish-Dutch-Russian) literary dictionary (Nomenclator Literarius, Francke, 1980). lieutenant contains 2,604 groups of terms and an extensive index, with the Russian terms also in Cyrillic script. lieutenant sold out almost immediately, mainly to libraries and comparatists.
All of these books (and several others, in total 44 books and booklets) were re-published by Igel Verlag (Hamburg) and Grin Verlag (Munich).
Thus, Ruttkowski is most likely the most published author in the fields of Poetics of Literary Genres, Psychology of and Literary Terminology.
Member American Association Teachers of German, Japanese Gesellschaft für Germanistic, International Vereinigung für Germanische Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft.