Consolidating Theory: An Interview with Vincent B. Leitch

Vincent B. Leitch with Clifford Manlove Consolidating Theory: An Interview with Vincent B. Leitch Theforemosthistorianofcontemporaryliterarycriticismandtheory,VincentLeitch is theauthoro/Oeconstractive Criticism: AnAdvanced Introduction(Columbia UP, 1983); American Literary Criticism from the 1930s to the 1980s (Columbia UP, 1988); Cultural Criticism, Literary Theory, Postsrrucuralism (Columbia UP, 1992); Postmodernism—Local Effects, Global Flows (SUNY P, 1996); and Theory Matters (Routledge, 2003). In the late 90s, he turned to marshal the new Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2001), for which he serves as General Editor. This interview was conducted shortly after the Norton appeared; it took place on 7 July 2001 at Vincent Leitch's home in Norman, OK. It was conducted by Clifford Manlove,former managing editor ofthe minnesota review and currently assistant professor of English at Penn State-McKeesport, and transcribed by Eric Leuschner, assistant to thejournal. Clifford Manlove: I guess we'll begin by talking about the nuts and bolts of The Norton Anthology ofTheory and Criticism. You were invited by Norton to take on the project. How did it happen? Vincent B. Leitch: The first thing that happened was I got a phone call from a W. W. Norton editor asking me if I'd review a proposal that had been sent to them for a theory anthology. So I did a standard, three- or four-page evaluation, and talked about the problems in the proposal and what would be a better way to do an anthology. A few months later, to my surprise, the Norton editor showed up at my office door, and I had a conversation with him about who, I thought, would be the right person to edit the anthology, giving him a list of the top candidates around the country. He asked me if I would be interested, and I told him only if it could be a team project. Previous anthologies had tended to be done by one editor or two co-editors, but it seemed to me that the way to do an anthology at this point would be to get a dream team of a half-dozen people. His initial response was that there probably wasn't enough money to spread around to half-a-dozen different editors, but I told him I didn't think that money was going to be the primary motivation for doing the project. We went through a negotiation process, and I added some things to the contract—for example, that Norton would put up five thousand dollars for ancillary materials, like the instructor's manual. No other anthology of theory and criticism has one. I also had written into the contract that they would pay for an index, because I knew I couldn't do a sophisticated index for twenty-three hundred Norton-sized pages! Actually, in the process of 46 the minnesota review negotiating the contract, I had occasion to call up other Norton anthology editors to get their advice. I asked "If you had to do it all over again, what would you want in your Norton contract?" So that created a community of Norton editors who were back-up advisors and who were helpful later on. Manlove: And this was 1995? Ldtch: All of this happened within about nine months, September through May 1995-96. Manlove: Did you expect that it would take five or six years? Leitch: We were projecting that it would come out in 2000, and it came out 2001. We missed by a year because one of our editors, two years into the project, got an administrative position and quit, so we had to hire a replacement at that point, actually two replacements in order that we would only fall that one year behind. Manlove: You're the general editor; how did you select the other editors? Leitch: I made up a list of ideal candidates in consultation with the W. W. Norton editor. We got copies of their work, evaluated them, and looked at their vitas. It resembled a search committee process. A few of the candidates weren't interested; they were doing something else. There was a list of maybe seven or eight candidates that myself and the Norton editors finally agreed upon, and I started to...