In Memoriam: Charles F. Fraker, Jr.
In Memoriam:Charles F. Fraker, Jr.
Charles F. Fraker, Jr. (1923-2020) passed away in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on November 23, 2020. Professor Fraker, Carlos to those who knew him, was a member of the Spanish faculty in the Department of Romance Languages of the University of Michigan from 1965 until his retirement in 1992. He was author of several books and numerous articles on a broad range of topics in medieval Iberian literature ranging from the historiography of Alfonso X to the Celestina. An accomplished teacher and dedicated thesis advisor, he formed two generations of hispanists from among his Ph.D. students and mentored countless others in adjacent fields.
Carlos joined the faculty of the University of Michigan in 1965. He received tenure in 1968 and was promoted to full professor in 1977. He retired in 1992 and was named professor emeritus. Before coming to Michigan, he had worked at Wesleyan University. His father, Charles F. Fraker Sr., had earned a Ph.D. in Romance Philology from Harvard [End Page 5] University in the 1930s, and had written one of the first dissertations on Spanish Modernism. His mother was from Puerto Rico. Carlos grew up on college campuses (Northwestern University and later the University of Massachusetts), speaking Spanish at home. Nevertheless, his first interest was music, a passion he carried throughout his life. His undergraduate degrees were in music, and he was an accomplished keyboardist. He earned a B.A. from the University of Massachusetts, a B.S. from Yale, and an M.A. in Spanish at Middlebury College in 1953, a program that included a year studying in Madrid and living at the Residencia de Relaciones Culturales. He taught for several years at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, before leaving to pursue a Ph.D. at Harvard. There he met his wife, Doris, also a graduate student in Spanish and a disciple of Jorge Guillén.
At Harvard he worked with Stephen Gilman and wrote a dissertation entitled The Doctrinal Poetry in the Cancionero de Baena, which he defended in 1963. This became the topic of his first scholarly publications, which included a series of articles published from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, as well as a book, Studies on the Cancionero de Baena, published in 1966. This was the first systematic examination of the influence of Jewish thought on the work of the converso poets that had been included in the Cancionero.
This interest in intellectual history and literature carried over to his research in other texts. His book, Celestina: Genre and Rhetoric, published in 1990, is the culmination of his work on rhetoric in the Celestina, combining several previously published studies and several new ones. He states in the prologue that he arrived at Harvard in 1957, the year that Gilman's The Art of La Celestina came out. While he expresses his debt to his former teacher, he notes that his work is very different in that he attempts to highlight Celestina's debt to classical literature rather than its originality, as Gilman and María Rosa Lida, authors of two fundamental books on the text, had done. He continued in this vein with the Libro del Aleixandre. He published The Libro de Aleixandre: Medieval Epic and Silver Latin in 1993. In it he explores the influence of French and Roman [End Page 6] authors on the Aleixandre, particularly Lucan's Pharsalia. This interest in classical rhetoric stems no doubt from collaboration with other scholars at Michigan who studied rhetoric and rhetorical theories, particularly Luísa López Grigera.
The translation, adaptation, and interpretation of texts was the basis of his work on Alfonsine historiography, both the Estoria de Espanna and the General estoria. He was, as he often said, among the first to read these histories as coherent texts compiled with a purpose and internal logic, and not simply as objects of source study or a trove of prosified epics to be extracted. His work on Alfonsine historiography was published first as a series of articles beginning in 1978 and later collected in a volume entitled The Scope of History, published in 1996. Beyond these texts, he wrote on the...
