Daniel R. Schwarz

Cornell University | CU · Department of English

Herta Muller's The Hunger Angel is a dramatization of Leo Auberg's evolving and often erratic consciousness. The Hunger Angel might be called a Bildungsroman manque. Similar to the narrators in many Holocaust novels and memoirs, the narrator in The Hunger Angel is relating a traumatic experience that has reshaped his life. Muller's arrangement of c...

This chapter describes the process of writing Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. Death in Venice reflects a cultural moment in early twentieth‐century Europe when Mann believed materialism, selfishness, and narcissism were foregrounded, while imagination and passion contracted and often found an outlet in perverse forms. It lives on the borderland betw...

Marcel Proust's Swann's Way is one of seven novels that comprise Remembrance of Things Past, sometimes called In Search of Lost Time. It is not easy to pin down the chronology of Swann's Way, in part because Proust's point is that the inner life rather than external facts drives the narrative. Proust creates a fictional narrator and the narrator th...

This chapter discusses Italian author Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels, My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child. While rendering poverty, class differences, and violence in Naples from 1950 to 2010, these novels take place against the backdrop of Italian and world politics....

Written by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard is one of the great historical novels of twentieth‐century European literature and, with its manageable length, has become a classic of Italian literature and a staple of European novel courses. Each chapter is a kind of set piece in the transformation of Sicily. The novel is an elegy for Sicily...

This chapter introduces Giorgio Bassani's entire corpus and shows how his Ferrara novels and stories hold together as one coherent fictional history. Bassani was part of the Jewish community in Ferrara that dates back hundreds of years. Like many European writers who lived through World War II and especially like other Jewish writers, Bassano write...

Influenced by Joyce's word play and stylistic experimentation and that of other early twentieth‐century modernists, the 1999 Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago's The History of the Siege of Lisbon is a politically and historically sophisticated novel that draws upon diverse genres. The novel dramatizes how the history of Portugal derives from the conques...

Imre Kertesz's novel Fatelessness is a unique fictional rendering of the Holocaust from the point of view of an adolescent experiencing arrest by being pulled off a bus in Budapest, falling critically ill, finally being released, and returning home a totally different person. The novel's chapters follow stages in Georg's education and resemble a tr...

This chapter discusses Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis and his other works that provide a context for understanding The Metamorphosis. The focal points in The Metamorphosis are on Gregor Samsa's employer bullying him, on the lack of jobs with dignity for either Gregor or his father, and on the devolution of the traditional family and community as a...

Reading Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red, one can imagine theirselves in sixteenth‐century Istanbul at a time when arbitrary law, including torture, coexists with lawlessness and near anarchy in a civilization marked by a great gulf between wealth and poverty. My Name is Red is not only offers people a window into the Ottoman Empire of 1591, but also b...

With its innovative use of magic realism to inflect political themes, Gunter Grass's novel The Tin Drum is an important work in the history of the European novel. The Tin Drum is not realism, fable, allegory, surrealism, picaresque, fantasy, Bildungsroman, romance, or political and social satire but takes from all these genres and often moves rapid...

Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being describes mediocrity, kitsch, the ordinariness and disappointments of life, the painfulness of love, the quirkiness of desire, the process of aging as well as death's inevitability and ubiquitous presence in all human life. It depends on paradoxes and offers what seems to be fixed concepts and abstr...

Albert Camus's The Stranger is often discussed as an “existential novel”, because existence precedes essence in an absurd world. The first part reveals Meursault as a moral idiot who defines himself by a senseless act. The second part shows how circumstances push him not only to take part in the conventional world he detests but also to define hims...

“Elie Wiesel: His Significance, Accomplishments, and a Personal Reminiscence,” Huffington Post, Aug. 2, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-r-schwarz/elie-wiesel-his-significa_b_11302710.html Article discusses the importance of Wiesel's Night to the development of Jewish Studies and why Night is successful as a holocaust memoir. Also discus...

See http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1118974859.html See http://www.amazon.com/How-Succeed-College-Beyond-Learning/dp/1118974859 How to Succeed in College and Beyond: The Art of Learning Daniel R. Schwarz ISBN: 978-1-118-97485-8 208 pages February 2016, Wiley-Blackwell Buy Paperback $19.95ADD TO CART Hardcover $54.95ADD TO CART...

The connection between teaching and research depends on a number of variables, including where one teaches, how many courses one teaches, what the teaching expectations are, what field one teaches in, and what kind of students one teaches. It also depends on the criteria by which one rates teachers. It is clear that those who do research find a str...

In this chapter, the author's suggestions for how to plan the future are divided into two categories, namely future plans and life after college, although they overlap. For graduate programs, one needs to know what the requirements are. A gap year between college and graduate school is often a good idea. Understanding how the new environment functi...

Finding the right fit for college is a complex process requiring considerable effort. But, because most colleges now accept the Common Application, it is much easier than it once was to apply to several colleges at once. This chapter highlights that the College Olympics competition is not always fair. Legacies and athletes are given preference. Tho...

The problem for today's college students, and especially juniors, is how to balance the practicality of learning with the joy of learning. Junior year is a bridge between the college experience and the post-graduate experience. It is a year for testing and refining values. Going abroad in junior year often makes young adults better citizens by offe...

This chapter offers suggestions that apply to all entering freshmen, although a few may be more apropos to those living on campus. It suggests that a college freshman should keep his career and life goals in mind, and remember why he enrolled at the college and in the program he chose. Next, it advises to keep a daily record of how the freshman is...

This chapter begins with a question, were the Greek system proposed today as a way of improving campus life for colleges and universities, would it be approved? Dartmouth students have become increasingly impatient with the Greek system. The Greek system often encourages a kind of sectarianism in which membership in the fraternity or sorority takes...

According to the author, the humanities not only include literature of both ancient and modern languages, the performing arts, philosophy, history, comparative religion, and cultural studies, but also anthropology and linguistics. He presents his reasons to study the humanities, with a particular focus on the arts. The author's reasons balance util...

If any one thing determines success in school and in life, it is time management. In one's college years, stress the development of crucial skills: writing effectively, speaking articulately, thinking critically, studying with focus, working well with others, as well as computer literacy and economic intelligence. Classes in public speaking and act...

College students are young adults and need to take the initiative to solve roommate issues, housing problems, course registration, and challenging assignments. This chapter explores what parents need to know about their children in college. Parents need to be attentive to behavior that affects their child's physical and mental health, including bin...

The author aims to transform a class into a community of inquiry in which students commit themselves not only to the teacher and to the course material, but also to each other in a spirit of learning. In a community of inquiry, the class does not stop when students and teachers separate and the course ends. The students speak to one another outside...

This chapter provides suggestions for preparing young people for college. A student needs to develop the necessary skills to pursue a college degree, although in truth there are many kinds of colleges, and some are far more difficult than others in terms of both admittance and performance expectations. Part of college preparation is figuring out wh...

The senior year in college is an excellent opportunity to bring one's undergraduate years to fruition and open doors to the next phases of growth and development. One may have entered college as an 18-year-old adolescent, but the goal should be to leave as an adult ready to confront the challenging world of graduate school or employment. One also n...

This chapter explores what we need to know before deciding to pursue a Ph.D. in the humanities is that when we finish your degree we will be entering a very difficult job market, in part because many colleges and universities supplement their tenured faculty with adjuncts. Many grad students convince themselves that the joy of learning is enough, b...

English majors choose a major that not only challenges them intellectually but also gives them pleasure. They love to read and they think that reading matters. Or they hope to be writers and have taken courses in creative writing to test their potential as poets, fiction writers, and dramatists. What English majors bring to career possibilities are...

As sophomores, students need to focus on planning for the future, something that should not be left to their senior year. Colleges and universities are becoming increasingly proactive about providing resources to help one's planning. This chapter presents 19 suggestions for sophomores who quite often are 19 years of age. In author's experience, stu...

This chapter presents a discussion on comparing contemporary students with those of the explosive 1968-1970 period. Education has always been a balance between inside and outside the classroom. Some healthy dents were made in the notion of the professor as the unquestioned emperor of knowledge. The curriculum has evolved in response to the issues r...

This chapter discusses the suggestions for how to choose classes in college. Even after fulfilling basic graduation requirements, STEM majors need to expose themselves to the humanities and social sciences; humanities majors need to take some basic sciences and social sciences; and students in the social sciences need to think about the humanities...

In this chapter, the author argues that humanities help individuals understand themselves and the world in which they live. The humanities contribute to the moral, historical, and political awareness; this occurs even if the events described in a literary text, a painting or sculpture, or an operatic or theatrical performance are more imaginative t...

In his day, J. Hillis Miller, now in his eighty-eighth year, was one of the most influential of literary scholars, among the leaders in introducing phenomenology and, later, deconstruction to an Anglo-American audience. His early books The Disappearance of God (1963), Poets of Reality (1965), and The Form of Victorian Fiction (1968) were greatly in...

In Reading the European Novel to 1900 : A Critical Study of Major Fiction from Cervantes' Don Quixote to Zola's Germinal, Daniel R. Schwarz’s balances formal and historical criticism in precise, readable prose, this book offers close readings of individual texts with attention to each one’s cultural and canonical context. Major texts of the perio...

Gustave Flaubert brought to literary realism scrupulous aesthetic control and polish exceeding that of his predecessors. That every sentence–even every word–of Madame Bovary throws a slightly new light on what he is describing and resonates with other sentences and words makes it a paradigm of organic unity. Flaubert focuses much of the novel on Em...

In The Brothers Karamazov the characteristic scene is a conversation, sometimes between two people and sometimes more, as in the extended opening scenes at the monastery. Each character is engaged in a continuing process of defining himself or herself. But complex characters have what Bakhtin thought of as ?unfinalizability? because they cannot be...

Tolstoy wanted to render the truth about the Napoleonic period as he understood it and to show the folly in seeing it in reductively romantic terms as good versus evil or the fulfillment of God's ordained teleology. He detests Napoleon's megalomania, ambition, solipsism, and self-immersion. Tolstoy's narrative voice is that of a Russian patriot spe...

Dostoevsky is mystic who believes in the Russian soul as an individual and collective entity; he believes that Russia must find its own way derived from its own past and cultural traditions. Dostoevsky understands that we humans do not always act logically or in our self-interest. Dostoevsky identified with the Slavophils in discriminating between...

Honoré de Balzac's Père Goriot takes place in 1819 after the Bourbon Restoration, which was interrupted by the Hundred Days of Napoleon's return. While the restored monarchy was a constitutional monarchy, it was conservative and often indifferent to the lower classes, many of whom lived in poverty. Balzac's noir vision of Paris and of the shortcomi...

To understand the French novel in the nineteenth century, one need to read four authors namely Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, and Zola. While human passions are the main focus of the first three, Zola focuses on social and economic conditions that he believes are the main determinants of character and personality. Zola's interest is in the lower class...

Leo Tolstoy's protagonist in Anna Karenina is Russia in the late nineteenth century after the freeing of the serfs but still in the time of the tsars. Among the historical themes in nineteenth-century novels that recur in Anna Karenina are the transformation of agrarian life due to machinery and the concomitant effect on traditional rural communiti...

This intoductory chapter provides an insight into the contents of this book, the first of a two-volume study, which includes major novels published before 1900 that are frequently taught in European novel courses. Much of it deals with works by the great Russians: Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karama...

This chapter begins with a discussion of individual works in the early years of seventeenth-century Spain with Don Quixote (1605, 1615), an experimental and innovative novel that became a paradigm for subsequent texts. The author discusses Don Quixote from both a formalist and humanist perspective, thinking about what Miguel de Cervantes contribute...

The author begins his inquiry into the French nineteenth-century novel–works by Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola – he observes that these writers create characters for whom, to cite Schwartz's phrase, the “unheroic and uneventful moments in middle-class lives” are not enough. The turn towards politics and engagement in the material world may be...

From false stories about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to growing competition from online and twenty-four-hour cable news, the first decade of the twenty-first century was not particularly kind to the New York Times. In this groundbreaking study of the recent life and times of America's most important newspaper, Daniel R. Schwarz describes th...

In this widely circulated essay, “What to Do with a B.A in English?” Nov. 2, 2013, Huffington Post. http://t.co/ArxW1dR7p5 via @HuffPostCollegeI I show that English majors are succeeding in diverse fields and that a English major has valuable skills in writing precisely, speaking articulately, reading insightfully,, and thinking.integratively

Strong defense of what the humanities add to quality of life, how the arts give us a lifetime of pleasure, and how the arts and humanities help us understand the world in which we live as well as ourselves.

Our culture attempts to separate competing ideological factions by denying relationships between multiple perspectives and influences outside of one’s own narrow interpretive community. The distinguished essayists in this volume find Daniel R. Schwarz’s pluralistic, self-questioning approach to what he calls “reading texts and reading lives” quite...

“A Bibliography of Major Works by Daniel R. Schwarz,” edited and annotated by Brian W, Shaffer, in Reading Texts, Reading Lives: Essays in the Tradition of Humanistic Cultural Criticism in Honor of Daniel R. Schwarz, eds. Helen Maxson and Dan Morris, co-published by Rowman and Littlefield (UK) and Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware Press,...

In the United States, Giorgio Bassani (1916-2000) is undoubtedly the most neglected major European Jewish and Holocaust writer, although Bassani's novel, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1962), was made into an Oscar-winning film by Vittorio De Sica (1971). Yet in Italy Bassani, along with Primo Levi, is considered one of the two pre-eminent write...

In this major collection, the editors--Janice Carlisle and Daniel R. Schwarz--in Narrative and Culture draw together fourteen essays in which leading scholars discuss narrative texts and practices in a variety of media and genres, subjecting them to sustained cultural analysis. The essays cross national borders and historical periods as often and a...

Written by influential scholar-critic and award-winning Daniel R. Schwarz, In Defense of Reading: Teaching Literature in the Twenty-First Century is a passionate and joyful defense of the pleasures of reading. This stimulating book provides valuable insights for teachers and students on why we read and how we read when we embark on "the odyssey of...

PrologueTeaching GoalsThe Freshman Seminar as an Introduction to University Intellectual OpportunitiesTeaching WritingTeaching ReadingBuilding the Bridge between Reading and WritingCreating a Community of Inquiry

IntroductionJoyce's Dubliners: What We Learn from JoyceLearning from Conrad's Political VisionA Passage to India as a Window on IndiaReading Women: What We Learn about Women's (and Men's) Psyches from Reading Virginia WoolfLearning from Nadine Gordimer's The PickupHow We Learn from Holocaust LiteratureConclusion

Reading as an OdysseyThe Continuity between Reading and WritingReading as a CultureWhat Is Literary Meaning? Responding to and Resisting the Author's ValuesWhy We ReadInterpretive History and MeaningThe Power of Reading: Raising the StakesReading in Historical and Cultural ContextsStages in Our Odyssey of ReadingInterpretive CommunitiesLaunching an...

The Idea of the University and the Economics of a UniversityThe Economics of the UniversityThe Function of the Humanities Professor in the Contemporary UniversityChanges in the Profession of Teaching Literature

Situating MyselfThe Jew as (Not Always Comfortable) Guest in the House of English LiteratureLeslie Fiedler's Challenge to the New CriticismFinding a Home in a Restricted NeighborhoodJews as Public IntellectualsConclusion: The Return of the Repressed

Career Embarkation: Applying to Graduate SchoolWhat Happens in Graduate SchoolChoosing a Dissertation TopicWriting DissertationsInterviewing: Some Advice to Job CandidatesAcademic CareersSucceeding Professionally: Balancing Teaching and WritingRetirement

The Maharal of Prague, Rabbi Loew, created golem out of clay by means of cabalistic rite to protect Jewish ghetto from siege. If potter's wheel could make a figure to keep our hurts at bay, if only we could breathe life into clay to: keep safe illusions shield our children ward off wounds and protect feelings from injury. Yet we need remember that...

definitive edition of Runyon's major stories and other writings in Penguin Classics edition with intro by Hamill and essay and excellent notes by Schwarz who has written the authoritative book on Runyon entitled Broadway Boogie Woogie: Damon Runyon and the Making of New York City Culture:

IntroductionThe Significance of Lily's Paintings?Time Passes?Conclusion: ?The Lighthouse?

IntroductionTom and LydiaAnna and WillUrsulaThe Significance of the Ending

BeginningsThe Marlow TalesMarlow's Role in Heart of DarknessToward a Pluralistic Reading of Heart of DarknessConclusion

IntroductionThe Modern Novel as Self-ExpressionParallels Between Modern Literature and Modern ArtThe Order of Art Replaces the Order of LifeConclusion

IntroductionForster's Contribution to the English NovelForster's OriginalityThe Modernity of Passage to India: Leaving Jane Austen's World BehindThe Transformation of Values within A Passage to IndiaConclusion

General worksHistoricalFeminist criticism and theoryMarxism, new historicism, and cultural studiesThomas HardyJoseph ConradD. H. LawrenceJames JoyceVirginia WoolfE. M. Forster

Introduction: Reading Virginia WoolfUnderstanding ClarissaHistoricism and Inclusiveness in Mrs DallowayDoubling: Clarissa and SeptimusThe Significance of the Ending

IntroductionMrs Morel and Paul's Oedipal ProblemLoving Miriam: Paul at War with HimselfLoving Clara: Paul's Temporary EscapeThe Significance of the Ending

Introduction: The Unity of Dubliners“Araby” as Paradigmatic Dubliners TextReading “Araby”“The Dead”

Introduction:“O Rocks … Tell us in Plain Words”Re-enter Stephen: The Opening Episodes of UlyssesLeopold Bloom: Joyce's Irish JewEpisode Nine: The Concept of Artistic Paternity in “Scylla and Charybdis”The Adventure of Reading: The Odyssey of Styles in Episodes Ten through FourteenCirce as the Climax of Joyce's Humanistic VisionThe Significance of “...

Approach and Method Cultural and Historical Contexts

Half TitleTitleCopyrightContentsAcknowledgments

modern psychological;economic forces;rural culture;aalternative perspective;cosmology

IntroductionThe Function of the Omniscient NarratorMarlow's All-Too-Human JudgmentThe Function of SteinThe Ending of Lord JimSuggestions for Reading Lord Jim

An indispensable critical text for the study of the modern British and Irish by the humanistic critic Daniel R. Schwarz who balances theoretical sophistication, historical knowledge and nuanced, powerful reading of the novels. Schwarz has studied and taught the modern British novel for decades and now brings his impressive erudition and critical a...

Consulting Editor, Daniel R. Schwarz is the author of the authoritative study of Disraeli's Fiction as well as other landmark essays on Disraeli. Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81) was one of the most important political figures in 19th century Britain. However, before rising to political prominence he had established himself as a major literary figure....

Reissued to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, Reading Joyce's 'Ulysses' includes a new preface taking account of scholarly and critical development since its original publication. It shows how the now important issues of post-colonialism, feminism, Irish Studies and urban culture are addressed within the text, as well as a discussion...

While analyzing Damon Runyon's high spirited work in terms of historical contexts, popular culture, and of the changing function of the media, Schwarz argues that in his columns and stories Runyon was an indispensable figure in creating our public images of New York City culture, including our interest in the demi-monde and underworld that explains...

In this essay I shall consider the place of the Jewish literary intellectual, the diaspora of Jewish public intellectuals from New York urban culture to the American universities, and the consequent transformation of public intellectuals into literary intellectuals. Writing from a personal perspective and suspecting that some of my memories-like th...

In 1825 the Erie Canal connected the Hudson River to the Great Lakes and established New York as the most important city in the United States. Even in the eighteenth century New York Harbor had dominated trade and commerce. Walt Whitman celebrated the noise, variety, and erotic energy of the city. His optimistic vision of a nation of brothers—of a...

By the 1920s modern urban life created a spectator culture, where the morning newspaper reported on sensational events, especially crime scenes and trials, to feed the insatiable voyeurism of the public. In this chapter we shall examine how Runyon’s reporting of major trials had an important effect on the transformation of these trials into crystal...

As a reporter who became a short story writer, Runyon’s stance is that of an observer rather than a participant. He began writing his Broadway stories at the age of forty-nine, but his reporting was the laboratory in which he perfected his technique and developed the cool, ironic, detached voice of the stories. In talking about the underworld, whet...

In the Turp stories, written originally as columns, Runyon demonstrates his understanding that New York reached beyond Manhattan and that he had given the customs and conventions of Greater New York, and in particular Brooklyn, scant attention. As Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace note, “[T]he nation’s first- and fourth-largest cities [Manhattan an...

While my organization is not strictly chronological, in this chapter my focus is on the later stories. Here I include only two written before 1936, and that is to keep together the stories of Runyon’s fictional surrogate, Ambrose Hammer. On balance, the later stories are some of his darkest ones, particularly those that take place in the 1940s as i...

When I was ten years old, I remember hearing hilarious laughter from my father while he was reading downstairs in the living room. When I went down to ask him what he was reading, he answered, “Damon Runyon.” It was a scene that occurred every few years when he would take all of Damon Runyon’s books out of the library. My father rarely laughed out...

In a later edition of The American Language, H. L. Mencken observed of Broadway language at the end of the 1930s: “[I]t is from this quarter that most American slang comes, a large part of it invented by gag-writers, newspaper columnists, and press agents, and the rest borrowed from the vocabularies of criminals, prostitutes and the lower orders of...

By examining Runyon’s work within the contexts of social and intellectual history and popular culture, I have argued that he not only is a significant figure in American culture between 1910 and his death on December 10, 1946, but that his legacy continues. Like Norman Rockwell, whose work was featured in The Saturday Evening Post, where a few of R...

Runyon’s success took place in a world where intellectuals and critics despised and patronized popular culture. I grew up in a world where serious people didn’t read the comics, go to musicals, or read popular fiction. Our teachers and professors taught the cult of intellectual elitism. I began reading the Peanuts comic strip on rare occasion in ou...

With his plain-speaking prose and slang, Runyon could write about the elite—entertainment and sports heroes, political and social figures—but he helped define aspects of the popular culture that belonged to white collar and blue collar workers. He played an important role in the creation of democratic language and in breaking the barriers between a...