Editing the Anthology: An Interview with Paul Lauter

Mike Hill Editing the Anthology: An Interview with Paul Lauter Paul Lauter is the editor ofThe Heath Anthology of American Literature , authorofCanons and Contexts (Oxford UP, 1991) and theforthcoming American Studies as Done by Paul Lauter, past-President of the American Studies Association, and A.K. and G. M. Smith Professor ofLiterature and American Studies at Trinity College (Hartford, CT). Besides these rather prodigious academic credentials, he was a leading member ofthe SDS in the 1960s, has held a range ofless than endowed academic positions, and was a co-founder of the Feminist Press. Mike Hill: I thought we could begin with some discussion about the origins of The Heath Anthology ofAmerican Literature. Un what context did The Heath Anthology emerge, and what specific objectives did you have? Paul Lauter: We started working on the book, at least conceptually, in 1968. There was an uprising of sorts within the Modern Language Association at that time, and part of this was to get the MLA to take political stands on a number of issues—the Vietnam War and civil rights, and so forth. It was a time of restlessness in the profession in general; but one thing that we were concerned with specifically was to redirect the MLA's support away from the Center for American Authors, which was then and is still, as far as I know, an organization that services the publishing of definitive editions of the standard American authors. At that point those authors were aU white and male, and itjust seemed a strange kind of allocation of resources, in view of the questions being raised by the civil rights movement and the very early women's movement, to go on reproducing those texts. MH: How in particular was MLA supporting this? PL: It was really just that the MLA's imprimatur allowed money to flow from foundations, the National Endowment for the Humanities, for example, towards the publication of elaborate critical editions, scholarly editions, ofbooks that everyone already knew. There's nothing wrong with that in principle, of course. But it meant the money wasn't going into finding and publishing many significant minority writers, many significant women writers, who hadn't been recently 170 the minnesota review pubUshed and so were not available. In 1968, we were fighting to change the directional flow of funding towards certain kinds of pubUcation . It was reaUy in 1969 that the great burst of publishing of African-American writers took place. That was in part born out of this earUer struggle. MH: So was this politics of pubUcation based on inclusivity, or one intended to change the standards of literary value? PL: It was a politics of inclusion, essentially what the civil rights movement was about. Of course, the thinking behind it was that if you begin to include, and include and include, then at some point the hierarchies change. You can't just include a lot ofwriters that you haven't had in your curriculum before and leave the curriculum the same. That at least was the way in which people were thinking at the time. Frankly, a lot of us didn't know who the writers were who were not included. We knew that they were out there. We knew a little bit about someone like Frederick Douglas, whose work was in print. We might have known a little bit about Claude McKay, say, but not much. Nineteenth -century African-American writers and many nineteenth-century women writers were just simply not in print, not available. A couple of Wharton novels were being read, but that was about it. So we began to speculate: what would happen "if"? And the "if" was making the texts available. How would that change the teaching of what was called "American literature"? And beyond that, since what is considered significant culturally is one of the ways in which things become considered significant sociaUy and poUtically, how would the pubUcation of marginalized authors change the politics, if at all, of the United States? MH: In a talk you gave in 1990 to the SUNY union of faculty and professional staff, the UUP [United University Professions], you used a couple of interesting terms: "literary...