Uitti, Karl David 1933-2003

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UITTI, Karl David 1933-2003

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born December 10, 1933, in Calumet, MI; died November 11, 2003, in Princeton, NJ. Educator and author. A professor at Princeton for over forty years, Uitti was an authority on French medieval literature and Romance languages. An alumnus of the University of California at Berkeley, he completed his Ph.D. there in 1959 and was promptly hired by Princeton as an instructor. By 1968 he was a full professor of Romance languages and literature, and in 1978 he was named John N. Woodhull Professor of Modern Languages; he also chaired the Romance languages department from 1972 to 1978, served as general editor of the Edward C. Armstrong Monographs on Medieval Literature, and was an editorial board member of Romance Philology from 1980 to 1998. Although his main interest was in the past, Uitti was also a forward-thinking scholar who was unafraid of modern technology; he is credited with heading the "Charette Project," the goal of which was to preserve medieval literature of the "Lancelot" tradition in electronic form. He was also not limited to medieval literature, being recognized as an expert on late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century literature, as well as modern Latin-American literature. Among Uitti's writings are The Concept of the Self in the Symbolist Novel (1961), Story, Myth, and Celebration in Old French Narrative (1973), and, with Michelle A. Freeman, Chrétien de Troyes Revisited (1995).