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Eugene Vance, Professor Emeritus of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington, Seattle, died May 14, 2011, when a plane he was piloting crashed at Arlington Municipal Airport near Seattle. Vance joined the faculty at the University of Washington in 1990. Raised in Newton, Massachusetts, Vance discovered his lifelong passion for medieval literature at Dartmouth College-where he was also an accomplished skier-from which he obtained his B.A. in 1957. He studied for his doctorate at Cornell University, which awarded him the Ph.D. in 1964. From 1962 to 1969, he taught English and French at Yale University. He subsequently taught at the Université de Montréal and at Emory University before moving to Seattle. Vance also held visiting professorships at the Universities of Toronto, Johns Hopkins, California at Berkeley, Duke, and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Vance published five books: Reading the Song of Roland (1972), L'Archéologie du signe, co-edited with Lucie Brind'Amour (1983), Mervelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages (1986), From Topic to Tale: Logic and Narrativity in the Middle Ages (1987), The Dragon and the Unicorn: The Rhetoric and Discourse of Power in Premodern Court Culture, co-edited with David Knechtges (2002). He also edited volume 45 of Yale French Studies, Language as Action, in 1970.
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Few scholars in our time have thought about the writings of Saint Augustine as persistently and passionately as Eugene Vance. Augustine's dictum that "faith inquires, but reason discovers and confirms," was axiomatic for him. Although in Gene's case, the "faith" in question was his belief in Augustine's unparalleled genius in recognizing that a religion of the embodied Word, the Logos, desperately needed a new theory of signs to teach believers why it was so revolutionary. But, for Gene, Augustine's sophisticated and complex sign theory was just as radical as the religion it was meant to teach. For Gene marveled at the skill with which Augustine combined his exposition of sign theory with man's search not simply for the origin of truth, but also for the understanding of the self and its relation to the world that came from understanding how words mean.
Like most students, Gene first experienced Augustine while reading The Confessions, his spiritual autobiography. Anyone who ever heard Gene...