Schwarz, Daniel R. 1941-

(Daniel Roger Schwarz)

PERSONAL: Born May 12, 1941, in Rockville Centre, NY; son of Joseph A. (a certified public accountant) and Florence (a homemaker) Schwarz; divorced from first wife; married Marcia Jacobson, 1998; children: David, Jeffrey. Education: Attended University of Edinburgh, 1961-62; Union College, B.A. (magna cum laude), 1963; Brown University, M.A., 1965, Ph.D., 1968.

ADDRESSES: Home—Ithaca, NY. Office—Department of English, 242 Goldwin Smith Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853. E-mail—drs6@cornell.edu.

CAREER: Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, assistant professor, 1968-74, associate professor, 1974-80, professor of English, 1980—, Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English Literature, 2007—, Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, 1999—. National Endowment for the Humanities, director of summer seminars, 1984-93; University of Arkansas, Distinguished Visiting Cooper Professor, 1988; University of Hawaii, Citizen’s Chair in Literature, 1992-93; University of Alabama, Visiting Eminent Scholar in the Humanities, 1996. Visiting scholar at Oxford University and Cambridge University, and in the United States and Australia. Member of editorial board, Conradiana, 1983—, Journal of Narrative Technique, 1984—, Weber Studies: Interdisciplinary Humanities Journal, 1991—; and Narrative, 1992—.

MEMBER: International Association of University Professors of English, Society for the Study of Narrative Literature (president, 1990), Modern Language Association of America, Society for the Study of Narrative Literature (founding member), Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS: Grant from American Philosophical Society, 1981; “outstanding book” citation, Choice, 1993, for Narrative and Representation in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens; grant from Institute for European Studies, 1994; Western Society travel grant, 1994; Stephen and Margery Russell Distinguished Teaching Award, Cornell University, 1998.

WRITINGS:

Disraeli’s Fiction, Barnes & Noble (New York, NY), 1979.

Conrad’s Fiction: “Almayer’s Folly” to “Under Western Eyes,” Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1980.

Conrad: The Later Fiction, Humanities (Atlantic Highlands, NJ), 1982.

Humanistic Heritage: Critical Theories of the English Novel from James to Hillis Miller, University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1986, revised edition, 1989.

Reading Joyce’s “Ulysses, ” St. Martin’s Press (New York, NY), 1989.

The Transformation of the English Novel, 1890-1930: Studies in Hardy, Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Forster, and Woolf, St. Martin’s Press (New York, NY), 1989, revised edition, 1995.

The Case for a Humanistic Poetics, University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1991.

Narrative and Representation in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, St. Martin’s Press (New York, NY), 1993.

(Editor and contributor) James Joyce, The Dead: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical Essays and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives, Bedford Books (Boston, MA), 1994.

(Editor, with Janice Carlisle) Narrative and Culture, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1994.

(Editor and contributor) Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical Essays and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives, Bedford Books (Boston, MA), 1997.

Reconfiguring Modernism: Explorations in the Relationship between Modern Art and Modern Literature, St. Martin’s Press (New York, NY), 1997.

Imagining the Holocaust, St. Martin’s Press (New York, NY), 1999.

Rereading Conrad, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 2001.

Broadway Boogie Woogie: Damon Runyon and the Making of New York Culture, Palgrave Macmillan (New York, NY), 2003.

Reading the Modern British and Irish Novel, 1890-1930, Blackwell Publishing (Malden, MA), 2005.

In Defense of Reading: Teaching Literature in the Twenty-first Century, Blackwell Publishing (Malden, MA), 2008.

Contributor of chapters to books, including T.S. Eliot, edited by Linda W. Wagner, McGraw Hill (New York, NY), 1974; Critical Approaches to Thomas Hardy, edited by Dale Kramer, Barnes & Noble (New York, NY), 1979; Conrad Revisited: Essays of the Eighties, edited by Ross Murfin, University of Alabama Press, 1985; A Companion to Henry James Studies, edited by Daniel Fogel, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1993; and Sons and Lovers: A Critical Survey, edited by J.N.R. Saunders, Macdonald & Evans. Contributor to the film Bloodhounds of Broadway, produced by Lisa van Eyssen, Cloverland, 2007. Contributor of articles, poetry, and reviews to periodicals.

SIDELIGHTS: Daniel R. Schwarz is the author of The Case for a Humanistic Poetics. In a review of the book in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, John Carroll noted that Schwarz believes that literary texts are representational and that readers can construe relatively determinate structures of meaning in a text. “Schwarz has no philosophical rationale for these beliefs, and he can thus only appeal stubbornly to common sense. I think this appeal is legitimate, particularly considering the flimsiness and arbitrariness of the poststructuralist theses that have superseded common-sense realism. But as Schwarz’s case suggests, in order to mount an effective counter-attack to anti-realist argument like that of deconstruction, one needs a fully formulated realist argument.”

The Dead: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical Essays and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives is a volume in the Bedford Books “Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism” series written for college students. In reviewing the book for Studies in Short Fiction, Brian W. Shaffer called it a “splendid” addition and praised Schwarz for his selection of contributors. He said Peter J. Rabinowitz “approaches Joyce’s final Dubliners story from the perspective of reader-response criticism; Michael Levinson from the perspective of New Historicism; Margot Norris from the perspective of feminism; and John Paul Riquelme from the perspective of deconstruction. Schwarz himself contributes a psychoanalytic reading of ‘The Dead,’ a balanced and wide-ranging discussion of the story’s biographical and historical contexts, and a comprehensive and insightful critical history of the story’s reception.” Shaffer called the essays by Levinson and Norris “provocative and original.”

Kathryn N. Benzel reviewed Reconfiguring Modernism: Explorations in the Relationship between Modern Art and Modern Literature in Clio. Benzel called Schwarz’s book “useful in two important ways: as a commentary on the modernist aesthetic and as an exploration of the complex critical world of interdisciplinary study. Schwarz’s analyses of such ‘high modernists’ as Henry James, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Wallace Stevens in terms of modern artistic movements (Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Cubism, with references to Dadaism, Fauvism, Futurism, and Surrealism) are provocative and introduce possibilities for further interdisciplinary discussion of modernists.”

Diane Richard-Allerdyce noted in Studies in the Novel that in Reconfiguring Modernism, Virginia Woolf is the single female whose works are featured. Richard-Allerdyce wrote that Schwarz’s book doesn’t “claim to provide a study of the Modernist period that takes the influence of male and female artists equally into account… and it leaves room for exploration of the implications of the African, Asian, and Pacific influences it demonstrates on European and American Modernism. But in its performing, as the best critical inquiry does, that which Cezanne and Eliot insisted was ‘the function of art… to look at the world with fresh eyes and to cast aside assumptions about how the world was supposed to look’…., it points us in the direction of further study.” Daniel Morris, writing in Modern Fiction Studies, stated: “His book should take its place within a larger meaningful pattern of cultural criticism that celebrates the work being discussed and, by doing so, reveals the author’s deep affection for its sources and for the process of learning about them over a lifetime.”

In his book Imagining the Holocaust, Schwarz investigates how writers and filmmakers have portrayed the Holocaust through imaginative texts instead of strictly documentary ones. “Schwarz’s book should be considered essential because of its purpose: to persuade readers that to vicariously experience the Holocaust means to address critical philosophical questions,” noted Milton Goldin in H-Holocaust. Jewish Currents reviewer Joel Shatzky observed: “Schwarz’s excellent analysis of so many [Holocaust texts] brings us closer to an understanding of the Holocaust.” Schwarz’s analysis includes Anne Frank’s diary and Steven Spielberg’s movie adaptation of Schindler’s List, as well as works by such writers as Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, and Cynthia Ozick. Daniel Morris, in Studies in the Novel, called Imagining the Holocaust a “valuable guide book,” and Elliot H. Shapiro of the Ithaca Times wrote, “It is, moreover, satisfying to read the sensitive and intelligent readings of the works of many authors… by a literary critic of such wide experience and formidable intelligence.”

Schwarz once told CA: “My fields are the theory of the novel and the English novel from Daniel Defoe through James Joyce, especially from the late nineteenth century through Virginia Woolf. In my writing, I consider myself a teacher entering into a dialogue with advanced students, colleagues, and teachers at other universities. I am primarily a literary critic who is trying to create a dialogue between primary works and literary theory, as well as between traditional approaches and recent ones, such as Deconstruction. I always try to be true to the spirit of the author’s original text, while realizing that literary works do have different meanings for different readers and eras.”

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Choice, November, 1993, B. Galvin, review of Narrative and Representation in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, p. 456; June, 1994, R.D. Newman, review of The Dead: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical Essays and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives, p. 1579; May, 1998, S. Donovan, review of Reconfiguring Modernism: Explorations in the Relationship between Modern Art and Modern Literature, p. 1522.

Clio, fall, 1999, Kathryn N. Benzel, review of Reconfiguring Modernism, p. 69.

H-Holocaust, January 29, 2000, Milton Goldin, review of Imagining the Holocaust.

Ithaca Times, March 22, 2000, Elliot H. Shapiro, review of Imagining the Holocaust, p. 32.

James Joyce Quarterly, summer, 1996, John Whittier-Ferguson, review of The Dead, p. 641.

Jewish Currents, April, 2001, Joel Shatzky, “The Holocaust: Remembrance and Reflection,” pp. 28-29.

Journal of English and Germanic Philology, October, 1995, Joseph Carroll, review of The Case for a Humanistic Poetics, p. 554.

Journal of Modern Literature, spring, 1999, Irving Ma-lin, review of Reconfiguring Modernism, p. 429.

Library Journal, July, 1987, Keith Cushman, review of Reading Joyce’s “Ulysses,” p. 79.

Modern Fiction Studies, winter, 1989, Monika Fludernik, “Monika Fludernik Responds,” p. 722, Marvin Magalaner, review of The Transformation of the English Novel, 1890-1930: Studies in Hardy, Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Forster, and Woolf, p. 849; summer, 1998, Daniel Morris, review of Reconfiguring Modernism, p. 438.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, fall, 1994, Irving Ma-lin, review of Narrative and Culture, p. 237.

Southern Humanities Review, winter, 2000, Kim Moreland, review of Reconfiguring Modernism, p. 81.

Studies in Short Fiction, summer, 1995, Brian W. Shaffer, review of The Dead, p. 502.

Studies in the Novel, summer, 1989, Rosemarie A. Battaglia, review of Reading Joyce’s “Ulysses,” p. 224; spring, 1990, Robinson Blann, review ofThe Transformation of the English Novel, 1890-1930, p. 109; spring, 2000, Diane Richard-Allerdyce, review of Reconfiguring Modernism, p. 97; summer, 2001, Daniel Morris, review of Imagining the Holocaust, pp. 243-245.

ONLINE

Daniel R. Schwarz Home Page,http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/drs6 (April 2, 2008).