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Reviewed by:
  • Reading Texts, Reading Lives: Essays in the Tradition of Humanistic Cultural Criticism in Honor of Daniel R. Schwarz edited by Helen Maxson and Daniel Morris
  • Louise Hornby (bio)
READING TEXTS, READING LIVES: ESSAYS IN THE TRADITION OF HUMANISTIC CULTURAL CRITICISM IN HONOR OF DANIEL R. SCHWARZ, edited by Helen Maxson and Daniel Morris. Newark, New Jersey: University of Delaware Press, 2012. xviii + 236 pp. $75.00.

The list of contributors at the end of Reading Texts, Reading Lives includes the following epigram: “Daniel R. Schwarz is the sine qua non” (235). This, of course, is the claim made by any festschrift, a deferential and devotional genre that cannot exist without its central object. I would venture that the editors of this volume are not just attaching the existence of the tribute to the life and career of Schwarz but are also hinging their own work and that of the other contributors on his legacy and teaching. The volume, comprised of twelve essays, a published conversation, and an annotated bibliography, is an effort to bear witness to the scholarship and mentorship of a professor who has indelibly marked the lives of his students and colleagues, and, as such, it succeeds. The achievement, however, is hermetic: it is guaranteed by the form of the festschrift itself, which is, in turn, symptomatic of the humanistic tradition Schwarz has defended and cultivated throughout his career.

The collection hews closely to its terms, and its essays are careful to speak in the vernacular of the cultural criticism they inherit from Schwarz. They cover a broad variety of works and authors, including modernists such as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, W. B. Yeats, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and Nella Larsen; contemporaries like Colm Tóibín, Toni Morrison, and Wendell Berry; Holocaust writers; and a discussion of Lee Friedlander’s photography. Of particular interest to readers of this journal will be the four essays on Joyce. Margot Norris’s comparison of “Eveline” and Larsen’s Quicksand offers a carefully nuanced consideration of modernist narratives of migration.1 Her essay stands out in the collection for stitching together Hugh Kenner’s earlier readings of Joyce and modernism with contemporary criticism, thus offering a historically grounded model for theoretical generosity and inclusion. Ed O’Shea’s reading of Joyce’s Dubliners alongside Tóibín’s stories identifies a shift in the representation of the city from tropes of paralysis to expansion. Steve Sicari draws from Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and Joyce to rethink the role of repetition in modern fiction against J. Hillis Miller’s Fiction and Repetition (which Schwarz has also taken to task).2 Beth Newman’s essay on Hebraism in Ulysses follows Schwarz’s lead, working to understand Bloom’s position as a Jew and Joyce’s own relationship to humanism.

The texts considered in the collection are cast into new and interesting comparative contexts (for example, Ruth Hoberman’s essay [End Page 543] brings the little-known work of Gilbert Cannan to bear on that of D. H. Lawrence and the painter Mark Gertler3). The theoretical and methodological territory, however, is necessarily and unabashedly repetitive, affirming, as the subtitle of the volume attests, Schwarz’s particular stripe of “humanistic cultural criticism” by following the same critical arc. The editors have thus chosen to honor Schwarz’s work by way of echo rather than argument. Even the penultimate chapter in the collection, which consists of a published conversation between Schwarz and Daniel Morris, one of the editors of the volume, presents itself as a further occasion for repetition. The conversation between mentor and mentee turns on the central tenets of Schwarz’s previously published work, in particular, his 2006 manifesto, In Defense of Reading.4 In light of recent discussions about new critical practices of reading that offer challenges to both humanism and theory (I think here of Steven Best and Sharon Marcus’s account of “surface reading” and Heather Love’s work on sociological practices of reading5), a very different kind of conversation might have been had. Rather than offering a “summary of the evolution of Schwarz’s thought” (xvii), the conversation could have considered Schwarz’s speculations within...

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