Gregory Polletta, retired professor of modern literature at the University of Geneva (Switzerland), died peacefully Aug. 6, 2012. He was 82.
Born in Italy, he came to Waterbury, Conn., as a child in 1934. In 1951 he graduated from the University of Connecticut and earned a master’s degree there in 1953. From 1953 to 1955, he was in the Counter-Intelligence Corps of the Army, and from 1955 to 1957, he was a technical writer for Union Carbide. He then earned a Ph.D. in English from Princeton in 1961. His doctoral dissertation on W.B.Yeats was supervised by Professor R.P. Blackmur.
Polletta was on the faculties of Brown, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of Freiburg before joining the University of Geneva in 1972. He retired in 1988. He edited two books of literary criticism, Intention and Choice: The Character of Prose (Random House, 1967), and Issues in Contemporary Literary Criticism (Little Brown, 1973), and wrote numerous articles.
Continuing to live in Switzerland in retirement, he visited frequently and maintained close ties with his family in the U.S., London, and those he reconnected with in Italy.
Polletta was predeceased by his wife, Audrey, in 1992. He is survived by three daughters and four grandchildren.
Graduate memorials are prepared by the APGA.