Humanism, Pluralism, and the Jewish Imagination: An Interview with Daniel R. Schwarz

Daniel R. Schwarz, Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English Literature at Cornell University, has been regarded as a master teacher, an influential literary critic, and a leading public intellectual. His prolific publications cover a wide variety of subjects, from Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Wallace Stevens to critical theory, the Holocaust, reading and teaching of literature, and New York City culture. Also, he has blogged regularly on the media and higher education for Huffington Post, and lectured all over the world, including teaching as a guest scholar at Peking University in 1993. On Behalf of Foreign Literature Studies, Zheng Li interviewed Schwarz on a series of issues, such as his humanistic and pluralistic critical approach, his philosophy of reading, the connection between modern art and modern literature, Holocaust Studies, and Jewish Studies. Schwarz sees reading as a kind of travel in which we explore how others live and think in both our own and different cultures. He believes that nothing makes clearer than the worldwide pandemic, Covid-19, that we are all united in "a community of common destiny", interdependent on one another. Finally, he expresses his gratefulness for the opportunities his life as teacher and scholar has presented and, with the lines from one of his favorite poems, C. P. Cavafy's "Ithaka", offers us a piece of advice, "Don't hurry the journey at all."