Daniel Schwarz's new book looks at the study of Rereading Conrad

By Stephanie Li

Cornell English professor and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow Daniel Schwarz has edited and collected his work on Joseph Conrad in the recently published Rereading Conrad. Derived from two decades of scholarship and accompanied by a newly written introduction, Schwarz's essays examine much of Conrad's major fiction, including Conrad's often overlooked later work.

English Professor Daniel Schwarz says he still reads Joseph Conrad's literature with "excitement and pleasure." Charles Harrington/University Photography

Although Schwarz's earlier work on Conrad, including the books Conrad: "Almayer's Folly" to "Under Western Eyes" (1980) and Conrad: The Later Fiction (1982) focused on the formal aspects of writing and the relationship between structure and content, his essays in Rereading Conrad reflect the changing theoretical environment and his more recent scholarly interests on issues of representation.

Schwarz calls Conrad a "conservative, multivalent and complex" figure, who still has tremendous appeal to students and scholars. Conrad's novels continue to speak to contemporary issues and, as Schwarz explains in his introduction, "we recognize on every page parallels to both our private lives and public reality." Writing as a cultural outsider, Conrad examines the difficulty of creating meaning while maintaining a skeptical approach to dogma and institutions. Such issues fascinate readers, and as Schwarz, who continues to teach works such as Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim and "The Secret Sharer" to undergraduates, notes "students love Conrad."

Schwarz, who wrote his undergraduate honors thesis on Conrad's political novels, was initially attracted to these works because they raise provocative issues concerning the relationship between author and narrator, and they also explore themes such as loneliness, political ambiguity and betrayal. Building upon the ideas presented in his 1997 book, Reconfiguring Modernism: Explorations In the Relationship Between Modern Art and Literature, one essay in Rereading Conrad examines the influence of Gauguin's paintings and journal on the creation of Heart of Darkness. Schwarz conceives of Rereading Conrad as a part of his larger project on modernism. Having published widely on a variety of modernist authors, including Joyce, Stevens and Woolf, Schwarz sees Conrad as a crucial modernist figure whose novels explore the struggle to create unity and coherence in a chaotic universe while also developing techniques such as interior monologue, stream of consciousness and psychoanalysis.

Schwarz notes that the study of Conrad has changed according to the developments of cultural history and the changes in critical approaches to literature. As a result, Schwarz calls his new book "both a history of my own ideas and of changes in the way Anglo-American literary criticism is practiced." For example, in the 1970s scholars did not discuss the homosocial and homosexual aspects of texts like "The Secret Sharer." However, recent developments in gay and queer studies have allowed critics to read and understand Conrad in new ways. Although he continues to define himself as an Aristotelian formalist, focused on the interrelationship among aesthetics, ethics and politics, Schwarz welcomes the contributions made by postcolonial, gender and cultural studies to the further understanding of Conrad's works.

The essays in Rereading Conrad account for the developments made by recent theoretical approaches and describe the various ways critics have responded to Conrad. While Schwarz affirms that these theoretical frames offer significant insights to texts, he stresses a dialogical approach to literature that is inclusive of multiple readings and perspectives. With the publication of Rereading Conrad, he welcomes the continued participation of scholars and students "in a community of inquiry."

After decades of studying and teaching Conrad, Schwarz says that he still reads Conrad with "excitement and pleasure." Available in hardcover and paperback, the publication of Rereading Conrad not only makes a significant contribution to the future of Conrad studies, but also marks a lifelong literary passion.