Daniel R. Schwarz

Daniel R. Schwarz (born 1941) is Frederick J. Whiton Professor of English Literature and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University in the USA where he has taught since 1968. He has held three endowed visiting professorships (at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, 1989; the University of Hawaii, 1992-93; and the University of Alabama, Huntsville, 1996). He was a guest Fellow for short periods at Oxford (Brasenose) and Cambridge (Girton) in the UK. He has directed nine NEH seminars, and has lectured widely in the United States and abroad, including a number of lecture tours under the auspices of the academic programs of the USIS and the State Department. He was a founding member of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature and served as its President from 1990 to 1991. He has been the President of the Cornell Phi Beta Kappa chapter since 2009. In 1998 he received Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences Russell award for distinguished teaching; the Weiss title, awarded by the University in 1999, further honors his teaching.

Schwarz is a humanist whose literary criticism avoids the abstractions of much modern critical theory in favor of a consideration of both context and text; what he calls his "mantra" summarizes this: "Always the text; always historicize." He explains his perspective in The Case for a Humanistic Poetics: "Since humanistic criticism assumes that texts are by human authors for human readers about human subjects, a humanistic criticism is interested in how and why people think, write, act, and ultimately live." His former graduate students and NEH participants have put together a forthcoming festschrift in his honor. Its title--Reading Texts, Reading Lives: Essays in the Tradition of Humanistic Cultural Criticism in Honor of Daniel R. Schwarz--testifies to Schwarz's influence as a teacher and scholar.

Schwarz holds a B.A. from Union College (New York) and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Brown University. His interests include travel, art museums, theater, and sports. He has two sons by his first marriage: David, the men's varsity tennis coach at Brown University, and Jeffrey, currently working in the mutual fund industry. His wife, Marcia Jacobson, is retired from Auburn University; she is the Hargis Professor of American Literature Emerita.

Books

• Reading the European Novel: A Critical Study of Major Works from Cervantes' Don Quixote to Lampedusa's The Leopard (under contract)
• Endtimes? Crises and Turmoil at the New York Times: 1999-2009 (2011, forthcoming)
• In Defense of Reading: Teaching Literature in the Twenty-First Century (2008)
• Reading the Modern British and Irish Novel, 1890-1930 (2004)
• Broadway Boogie Woogie: Damon Runyon and the Making of New York City Culture (2003)
• Rereading Conrad (2001)
• Imagining the Holocaust (1999)
• Reconfiguring Modernism: Explorations in the Relationship Between Modern Art and Modern Literature (1997)
• Narrative and Representation in Wallace Stevens (1993)
• The Case for a Humanistic Poetics (1991)
• The Transformation of the English Novel, 1890-1930 (1989; revised 1995)
• Reading Joyce's "Ulysses" (1987; reprinted 2004)
• The Humanistic Heritage: Critical Theories of the English Novel from James to Hillis Miller (1986)
• Conrad: The Later Fiction (1982)
• Conrad: "Almayer's Folly" through "under Western Eyes" (1980)
• Disraeli's Fiction (1979)

Editions

• General Ed., Reading the American and British Novel, nine vols. (in progress)
• Consulting Ed., The Early Novels of Benjamin Disraeli, six vols. (2004)
• Ed., Joseph Conrad, "The Secret Sharer" (Bedford Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism 1997)
• Ed., James Joyce, "The Dead" (Bedford Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism [1994])
• Ed., with Janice Carlise, Narrative and Culture (1994; reissued 2010)

Poetry and Travel Articles

Schwarz has published about 75 poems, a short story that has been anthologized, and numerous travel articles. For a sampling, see his homepage: http://courses.cit.cornell.edu/drs6

Persondata
Name	Schwarz, Daniel R.
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Date of birth	1941
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