About

I am Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English Literature and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University, where he has taught since 1968. In 1998 I received Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences Russell award for distinguished teaching, and the Weiss title also speaks to his teaching prowess.

I am the author of the recently released Crises and Turmoil at the New York Times, 1999-2009 (Excelsior Edition of SUNY Press, 2012) which is getting a good deal of attention. Of late I have been blogging on the media for the Huffington Post. In recent years I have published In Defense of Reading: Teaching Literature in the Twenty-First Century (2008) in the prestigious Blackwell Manifesto series. My books include Reading the Modern British and Irish Novel, 1890-1930 (2004), Broadway Boogie Woogie: Damon Runyon and the Making of New York City Culture (2003), Imagining the Holocaust (1999), Rereading Conrad (2001), Reconfiguring Modernism: Explorations in the Relationship Between Modern Art and Modern Literature (1997), Narrative and Representation in Wallace Stevens (1993)–a Choice selection for best academic book of 1993; The Case for a Humanistic Poetics (1991), The Transformation of the English Novel, 1890-1930 (1989; revised 1995), Reading Joyce’s “Ulysses” (2004; orig. ed 1987); 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); and Disraeli’s Fiction (1979).

I have edited Joyce’s The Dead (1994) and Conrad’s The Secret Sharer (1997) in the Bedford Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism Series, and co-editor of Narrative and Culture (1994). I have also edited the Penguin Damon Runyon (2008). I served as consulting editor of the six-volume edition of The Early Novels of Benjamin Disraeli (2004) for which I wrote the General Introduction.

I am General Editor of the multi-volume critical series Reading the Novel for which I wrote Reading the Modern British and Irish Novel, 1890-1930 (2004) and am now writing a 2 volume study on the European Novel.

My former graduate students and NEH participants put together a festschrift in my honor entitled Reading Texts, Reading Lives: Essays in the Tradition of Humanistic Cultural Criticism in Honor of Daniel R. Schwarz, ed Helen Maxson and Dan Morris, co-published by University of Delaware Press and Rowman and Littlefield (2012).

I have 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 State Department. I have held three endowed visiting professorships. I have published about 90 poems, some of which are available on his web page http://courses.cit.cornell.edu/drs6/ and a little fiction. I also write travel article for magazines and newspapers, and they too are on my web page

I am Faculty President of the Cornell chapter of Phi Beta Kappa as well as the longtime Faculty Advisor to the English Club and the Men’s Varsity Tennis Team. He is active in the Presidential Research and College Scholar programs.

My interests include travel (and writing about travel), art museums, theatre, and sports, especially swimming and playing tennis. I have two sons are Cornell graduates: David ’89, varsity men’s tennis coach at Brown after ten years at Middlebury where he coached his team to two Division Three National Team Championships and Jeffrey ’94, currently working in Boston as a Senior Associate Product Manager in the mutual fund industry. I am is married to Marcia Jacobson, a retired scholar who held the Hargis Professorship in American Literature at Auburn University.