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).
