Daniel Schwarz

Daniel R. Schwarz (born May 12, 1941) is Frederick J. Whiton Professor of English Literature and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University in the United States where he has taught since 1968. He is the author of fifteen significant books and numerous articles, many of which have appeared in prestigious journals and collections of essays. His recent book is Endtimes? Crises and Turmoil at the New York Times: 1999-2009 (2012) speaks to both scholarly and general audiences. 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 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 been the President of the Cornell Phi Beta Kappa chapter since 2009.

He has received recognition as an outstanding teacher. 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. His former graduate students and NEH participants have put together a festschrift in his honor. Its title--Reading Texts, Reading Live: Essays in the Tradition of Humanistic Cultural Criticism in Honor of Daniel R. Schwarz (University of Delaware Press, 2012)--testifies to Schwarz's influence as a teacher and scholar.

He has recently blogged for Huffington on current political and social issues and on higher education. His book, How to Succeed in College and Beyond(2016) developed in part from his Huffington and other articles.

Schwarz is a humanist and a pluralist; his literary criticism takes account of the theoretical revolution while avoiding the abstractions of much modern critical theory in favor of a consideration of both context and text. What he calls his "mantra" summarizes his efforts to balance formalism and historical criticism: "Always the text; always historicize." Historical criticism, for Schwarz, may include a psychoanalytic emphasis which takes into account the author's quest for meaning within a text. 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." Schwarz has called his approach "humanistic formalism." He focuses on the process of reading, specifically how the reader responds to the structure of effects created by the author and how readers learn from literary texts. (See, for example, his 2008 Wiley-Blackwell Manifesto, In Defense of Reading)

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