Johnson, Carroll B. 1938-2007 (Carroll Bernard Johnson)
Johnson, Carroll B. 1938-2007 (Carroll Bernard Johnson)
OBITUARY NOTICE—
See index for CA sketch: Born January 9, 1938, in Los Angeles, CA; died of a stroke, April 3, 2007, in Chicago, IL. Educator and author. A Spanish professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, Johnson was an authority on novelist Miguel de Cervantes. He attended UCLA for his B.A. and M.A. in 1960 and 1961, completing a Ph.D. at Harvard in 1966. Johnson joined the UCLA faculty in 1964, becoming a full professor in 1975. He also chaired the department of Spanish and Portuguese from 1975 to 1981 and from 1991 to 1996. Specializing in Cervantes and his famous novel Don Quixote, he was editor of the journal Cervantes and former president of the Cervantes Society. Johnson authored such texts as Madness and Lust: A Psychoanalytical Approach to Don Quixote (1983), Don Quixote: The Quest for Modern Fiction (1990), and Cervantes and the Material World (2000). He was often praised for his analyses of Cervantes' text, but a number of critics felt that his Freudian interpretations sometimes went to far, such as when Johnson speculated that Quixote's beard symbolized the phallus. In addition to his other activities, Johnson also organized the 2005 UCLA celebratory festival honoring the publication of Don Quixote and gave frequent lectures on the book.
OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:
PERIODICALS
Los Angeles Times, April 7, 2007, p. B13.