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Reading Texts, Reading Lives
Essays in the Tradition of Humanistic Cultural Criticism in Honor of Daniel R. Schwarz
Editors:
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Publisher:
2012
Summary
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 relevant to the current historical moment and political situation. A legendary scholar of modernist literature, Schwarz’s critical principles are a healthy corrective to cultural hubris.
The essayists treat works ranging from fictions by Joyce, Conrad, Morrison, and Woolf to the poetry of Yeats, to Holocaust literature, to the environmental writings of Wendell Berry, to the photographs of Lee Friedlander. The authors focus on different works, but they follow Schwarz in stressing formal elements most often associated with traditional realism while keeping an eye on historical and author-centered approaches. The essayists also follow Schwarz in their emphasis on narrative cohesion and in how they look for signs of agency among characters who possess the will to alter their fate, even in a seemingly random universe such as the one depicted by Conrad. Readers with eyes to ethics and aesthetics, they follow Schwarz in encouraging a values-centered approach that leaves room for the reader to address the ways in which reading a text correlates to the reader’s ability to find meaning and value in experience outside the text. Like Schwarz, the essays look for intentionality of authorial meaning (rather than something called an “author function”) as well as for the relationship between lived experience and the imagined world of the literary work (rather than the endless semiotic play of an ultimately indecipherable text).
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Bibliographic data
Copyright year
2012
ISBN-Print
978-1-61149-344-3
ISBN-Online
978-1-61149-345-0
Publisher
University Press Copublishing, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
236
Product type
Edited Book
Table of contents
ChapterPages
Contents No access
Introduction No access
Chapter One: Approaching Angels: The Case for The Case for a Humanistic Poetics No access Pages 1 - 14
Chapter Two: The Pluralistic Humanism of Wendell Berry No access Pages 15 - 30
Chapter Three: Making Life into Art: The Three-Way Conversation of Gilbert Cannan, Mark Gertler, and D. H. Lawrence No access Pages 31 - 50
Chapter Four: Of Temples, Prisons, Umbrellas, and Revolutionaries: Culture, Consciousness, and Poetry in D. H. Lawrence No access Pages 51 - 64
Chapter Five: Yeats’s Modernism in Time of Civil War No access Pages 65 - 80
Chapter Six: Female Transmigration in James Joyce’s “Eveline” and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand No access Pages 81 - 96
Chapter Seven: From Joyce to Tóibín: Postmodern Dublin in Mothers and Sons No access Pages 97 - 114
Chapter Eight: Repetition in Modern Fiction: From Paralysis to Hope No access Pages 115 - 134
Chapter Nine: Humanism Under Erasure: Identity and Nation in Joyce’s Ulysses No access Pages 135 - 152
Chapter Ten: Michael O’Siadhail’s Inscriptions of Holocaust Survivors’ Writings in The Gossamer Wall: “A summons to try to look, to try to see” No access Pages 153 - 168
Chapter Eleven: Historical Memorialization and Personal Memory in Lee Friedlander’s Self-Portrait and The American Monument No access Pages 169 - 182
Chapter Twelve: In a Mirror Dimly: The Limitations of Love in Toni Morrison’s Love No access Pages 183 - 200
Chapter Thirteen: Daniel R. Schwarz in Conversation with Daniel Morris No access Pages 201 - 220
Chapter Fourteen: A Bibliography of Major Works by Daniel R. Schwarz No access Pages 221 - 228
