Comment on the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism

The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism is the most comprehensive collection around, and since it strains at the limits of what can be compassed in a single book, it is not likely to be surpassed as authoritative reference point and pedagogic resource. Professors who are willing to compel their students to buy the weighty tome can certainly find in it the assignments for many sorts of theory or criticism courses. On a campus like Cornell’s, where most students carry their books in backpacks up and down hills, its weight tells against it, as a candidate for course adoption, and I wonder whether Norton might not do well to offer also, as publishers of some literary anthologies have done, a series of shorter versions adapted for particular purposes. Hiving off a 900-page volume of “Criticism and Theory to 1900” is an obvious possibility, but the remaining 1600 pages of “Twentieth-Century Theory and Criticism” would be harder to subdivide and would make quite hefty volume.

I myself would be more likely to adopt it for courses if there were a 20^th century volume of 2/3 the weight and 2/3 the price, but it is certainly interesting to have the first 900 pages, which not only contain the obvious choices—Aristotle, Plato, Longinus, Sidney and so forth—but also unsuspected riches. The selections from Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed, and Mazzoni’s Defense of the “Comedy” of Dante were discoveries for me, which remind me of the great benefit of canonization: a canon tells you what you ought to read with enough authority that you may well set about reading it. Anthologies that acquire canonizing status are particularly effective in this regard: they bring to your attention, while placing before your very nose, texts that you might ignore if you just encountered them on the shelves of a library or a bookstore and induce you at least to ask whether you should not read them (or why you have so far escaped reading them). If this is a major function of anthologies-and it seems a very important function for a canonizing Norton—then the sort of complaints I proffered above—that it is too heavy, contains too many texts I do not need for the particular courses I am inclined to teach—lose much of their weight. The Norton deliberately sets out to give us more than anyone would need, even texts that no one has been inclined to assign in courses on contemporary theory or the history of criticism, in order to broaden the prospects of education and self-education. How often do students read selections that are not assigned in anthologies they have been required to purchase? I don’t know the answer, but it is a question worthy of systematic study and could influence an evaluation of anthologies like the Norton.

Particularly distinctive about this Norton is the excellence of the headnotes that situate the selections in the context of the critics’ work and in critical and theoretical debate. I repeatedly found myself impressed at the judiciousness with which they inform while avoiding the pitfall of explaining in advance the significance of the selection. The problem of anthologies generally is how far to go down the road of pre-packaging. Since the essays were not written for an undergraduate course, editors are tempted to annotate, edit, and explain. The Norton resists the temptation to improve essays by cutting difficult or ancillary bits (or to select the 25 richest disparate pages of Foucault’s History of Sexuality), though it does provide a judicious condensation of “Plato’s Pharmacy,” by Derrida. And it avoids the temptation to make essays represent a “critical trend.” My major complaint is that there are not enough essays by Barbara Johnson, whose work I find incomparable for teaching criticism and theory, both for the incisiveness with which it addresses critical issues and for the exemplary lucidity and brevity of its engagements. Johnson is represented here only by...