Papers by Daniel A Schwartz
Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 2024
This article seeks to rethink Wallace Stevens’s elusive philosophicalness, particularly with resp... more This article seeks to rethink Wallace Stevens’s elusive philosophicalness, particularly with respect to the apparent resignation of the later poems. I suggest that Stevens’s philosophical preoccupations can be approached as displacements. Stevens’s self-ironizing fervor destabilizes the poetic surface, spawning a curious illusion: the nagging sense that one is reading only a kind of “screen-poem.” Interrogating this vexing rift, I argue that the significance of the anchoring lines wherein Stevens appears to make the philosophic core of his poetic vision tantalizingly concrete is apophatic, revealing only what that vision is (not) and cannot be.
Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 2024
Faulkner’s 'The Sound and the Fury' attempts to represent first-person experience in a radical fa... more Faulkner’s 'The Sound and the Fury' attempts to represent first-person experience in a radical fashion. In what I call (paradoxically) “free indirect discourse in the first person,” Faulkner ostensibly presents both thought thought and thought below the level of awareness together in one stream of text. The Quentin section in particular relies on an idealistic picture of language as meaningful in itself, apart from any intersubjective context or significant use, as though we could bypass communication and look inside Quentin’s head, finding not the brain but the “exact language” of his conscious life. I consider this temptation by way of Wittgenstein’s critique of the privacy of the mental. Wittgenstein’s aim, I argue, is not to deny or demote interiority, but rather to impugn a certain picture of how “the inner” must look — a realm composed of private objects to which the “I” alone has access. I thus suggest that we think of Quentin as an experiment, an appeal. Faulkner tries to reveal a mind in the brutal fullness of its suffering without forcing that mind to address us: to tell us that they suffer. I contend that this appeal fails, and in failing reveals the manner in which the (not-so-private) mind is essentially embedded in a shared, intersubjective world.
Slavonic & East European Review, 2023
Crime and Punishment’s epilogue has troubled readers since the novel’s publication. Recent schola... more Crime and Punishment’s epilogue has troubled readers since the novel’s publication. Recent scholarship, however, has demonstrated that the epilogue deserves reexamination -- that it sheds important light on many of the formal, generic, and interpretive problems central to the novel proper. This paper proposes that Raskol’nikov’s conspicuously unrepentant attitude to the very end can be read as calling into question the reality of his guilt. Specifically, I examine his third interview with Porfirii in which, I suggest, he (Porfirii) performs a kind of surrogate confession, thus unsettling our sense of Raskol’nikov’s ‘crime’ as straightforwardly a crime. Drawing on Kierkegaard’s exploration of Abrahamic faith in Fear and Trembling -- his suggestion that the ethical and religious interpretations of Abraham’s terrifying act necessarily clash -- I argue that Raskol’nikov occupies this knife edge between murderer and man of faith.
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Papers by Daniel A Schwartz