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David Damrosch - The Mirror and the Window: Reflections on Anthology Construction - Pedagogy 1:1 Pedagogy 1.1 (2001) 207-214

Roundtable

The Mirror and the Window:
Reflections on Anthology Construction

David Damrosch


The Longman Anthology of British Literature. Ed. David Damrosch. 6 vols. New York: Longman, 2000.

The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M. H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. 7th ed. 2 vols. New York: Norton, 2000.

The scholarship of pedagogy is becoming a vital area of scholarship in general, as the classroom has become recognized as a crucial space where ideas take root and a place as well where the institutional shaping of intellectual inquiry is particularly visible. The external form of anthologies can give a case in point. The dominant semester system has given rise to the two-volume format of many survey anthologies and has strongly influenced their length as well. As British, American, and world literature anthologies have crept up from around four thousand pages to their present heft of six thousand, the intellectual arbitrariness of this number in any given instance remains less striking than the extraordinary uniformity of the page boundary across all these fields. American literature, with its comparatively short history, apparently still requires the same six thousand pages needed for the thousand years of British literature; miraculously, the vast temporal and geographic scope of world literature apparently requires no more pages. Anthologies are as bounded in many ways as a Wordsworthian sonnet--or, say, a sonnet sequence, in this case a sequence four million words long--and the boundaries within which anthologists work are set as much by course structures and by printers' specifications as by scholarly concerns as such.

The growing inclusiveness that has brought many anthologies up to the six-thousand-page mark has bred the new problem of weight and readability of which Roger Sale so rightly complains. Hence my coeditors and I persuaded Longman to bring out our anthology in the six-volume format that we introduced in the summer of 1999. This format provides institutional as well as individual flexibility: it can be split 2-2-2 for quarter-system schools, as well as 3-3 for semester-system schools, and volumes can be used individually [End Page 207] in period courses. Though I could wish that the new edition of the Norton had reflected more independent thought and less reactive borrowing of the most visible innovations of our table of contents, I am very glad that Norton has now also adopted the six-volume format. 1 Ideally all the large survey anthologies will adopt comparable formats; we are all telling more varied stories than in the past, and this variety finds appropriate expression in the flexibility of the new six-volume presentation.

Unlike Wordsworth's nuns, anthology editors constantly fret that they can't fit more into their narrow rooms, and what goes into each room is significantly constrained by the needs of the classroom. Both the eighteenth century and the twentieth century are generally foreshortened in survey anthologies of British literature, for example, simply because those periods are typically taught at the end of fall and spring terms, when teachers are pressed for time and often prefer to give briefer assignments in any event to students who are working on papers and preparing for exams. Such institutional constraints mean that an anthology can never be a pure representation of its editors' canonical (or anticanonical) beliefs, particularly as anthologies are produced in close consultation with a wide range of reviewers teaching in the field. The anthology's users tend to be guided as much by what works well in class as by their own ideological presuppositions. Even granting that a teacher's sympathies will have a significant influence on student reception of a work, we all know how resilient students' preferences can be despite our best efforts to bring them around to our point of view. It was with a sigh rather than with satisfaction that one of our reviewers remarked over the phone, "Darling, no student ever asked for more Spenser." We reduced Spenser--but built up Milton, who continues to play well in class.

Such constraints profoundly shape an anthology's reception and its intellectual and ideological impact. All successful anthologies respond to shifting currents in the society in which they appear and in time contribute to the ongoing shaping of those currents. When it first appeared in 1962, for instance, the Norton Anthology of English Literature offered a creative response to social as well as intellectual changes in the landscape of American higher education. Its table of contents reflected and reinforced a developing pedagogical consensus favoring New Critical close reading of major authors, set within a loose framework of intellectual history (including a modicum of cultural context, interestingly reduced in subsequent editions). At the same time, the anthology's very form responded to new patterns of reading. M. H. Abrams and his collaborators decisively broke with the then dominant "textbook" form of anthologies--heavy books in a dense two-column presentation [End Page 208] that made reading more an act of contrition than a pleasurable experience. By contrast, the Norton had a wonderfully clear and readable design; "poetry in this anthology," Abrams (1962: xxxii) says proudly in his preface, "can still be read as it was written to be read: in a single column and with comfortable margins." The volumes were well under two thousand pages each and were designed to fit comfortably in the student's hand, "enabling him to carry and read the book anywhere--in class, at home in his room, or under a tree" (xxxiii). Subsequent editions expanded this topography with further locales-- "on a city bus, in a coffee shop"--reflecting the growing presence of commuting students on American campuses. Creating a self-contained universe, so amply introduced, annotated, and glossed that no outside assistance would be needed, the Norton embodied values of independence, mobility, and the primacy of individual perception and experience that accorded well with the American society of its time.

Midcentury American values also undergirded the linear narrative implied by the Norton's table of contents: a melting-pot ideal of culture informed its march of self-contained authorial oeuvres from Old English to Middle English and on through Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton into modernity. As Karen Saupe rightly notes, even in its new revision the Norton has "defined its scope by uniting works whose common bond is the English language, claiming that a shared vocabulary is essential to cultural unity." This linguistic unity set the tone for a range of related unities, or, more precisely, for a highly centered presentation; the Norton was centered on London (subject of its concluding endpapers in both volumes), on poetry (highlighted throughout the anthology, even in areas in which prose could have played an equal role), and on male writers. Even in the second edition of 1968, for example, Cardinal Newman alone had more pages than all of the women in the second volume put together.

The Norton came from a long line of linear narratives, going back to the great Victorian poetry anthologies, Palgrave's Golden Treasury and Quiller-Couch's Oxford Book of English Verse, and the textbooks of the early decades of the century. As George Woods put it in his preface to The Literature of England, published by Scott, Foresman in 1936, his anthology was built upon "the deliberate plan to secure unity by stressing the English spirit in English literature" (vii). Interestingly, in Woods's case such a unitary Englishness did not entail a bracketing of cultural concerns in favor of a free-floating aestheticism. On the contrary, the medieval section, for example, was organized largely through social categories reflecting medieval estates theory: "The Literature of the Warrior," "The Literature of the Priest," "The Literature of the [End Page 209] Common People," "The Church and the People." Selections included Alfred the Great, Ohthere, Ælfric, and popular writings such as beast fables, riddles, ballads, and a bestiary. In his preface, Woods defended this variety, noting that his emphasis on "the English spirit . . . has resulted, quite naturally, in the inclusion of some minor writers. These the authors present without apology, for a minor writer often embodies in his work a tendency which it is important to have illustrated" (viii). The first edition of the Norton stripped most of this cultural-contextual material away, increasing the space given to Chaucer and generally sharpening the focus on a limited number of major figures.

Though subsequent editions began to blur the Norton's unitary outlines, often the added materials read like afterthoughts or token additions; the anthology's main lines were not rethought, and the margins of the cultural map remained largely blank, despite the lively variety of materials coming into view in English studies over the past twenty years. The thing that actually tipped the balance for me when I was considering whether to undertake a new anthology was looking at the map of England inside the front covers of the sixth edition of the Norton, a map whose outlines in 1993 were unchanged from the first edition of 1962. Though Abrams and his coeditors included extensive selections from such Irish authors as Swift, Wilde, Yeats, and Joyce, they left Ireland off the map. Wales, on the other hand, was included--but no one who ever wrote in Welsh appeared in the table of contents. And this despite the fact that in the Middle Ages, for example, both Welsh and Irish literature were at least as vital as Anglo-Saxon. Indeed, if you were a medieval writer blessed with Merlin's gift of foresight and were eager to land an eventual place in the Norton Anthology, you would have done better to write in Latin than in Irish or Welsh, even though both of these languages are still spoken and written to this day, long after Latin and Anglo-Saxon have ceased to be living languages.

It is interesting that even very recently American anthologies would still be reproducing the nineteenth-century linguistic story wherein Anglo-Saxon gave birth directly--almost parthenogenetically--to Middle English. The philologists who created this narrative had their own cultural-political reasons for recovering a chthonic Anglo-Saxon culture and giving it more weight than Continental imports. At the same time, in the decades following the creation of the United Kingdom in 1801, Irish and Welsh were ignored in scholarship even as they were being suppressed in practice. In now making some (after all, still too modest) efforts to show more of the variety of British linguistic and literary culture, the Longman Anthology is reflecting a current [End Page 210] waning of the melting-pot idea of culture. One British reviewer of the anthology quite rightly describes its emphasis as "devolutionary"--fitting in with the Blair administration's push to give greater regional autonomy to Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Even more, in fact, it is the rise of "multiculturalism" in North America that has provided the cultural context for the Longman's initiatives. In this sense, a survey anthology is always as much a mirror of its host culture as it is a window into the culture treated in its pages.

I don't mean to say that anthologists are doomed merely to be swept along with the fashions of the moment in which they appear. Like all scholars, editors have the opportunity, and the responsibility, to tack against the prevailing wind, working both with and against the current to get students places they wouldn't otherwise reach. Nothing is gained if we merely substitute today's narcissistic triumphalism for yesterday's, but much can be gained if we see what opportunities we now have to do better justice to our subject, and to challenge ourselves and our students more creatively in the process. The breaking down of the old canonical unities, for example, allows us to paint a more realistic picture of the past. Even to do justice to the Englishness of the English spirit, it is better to have a fuller picture than students were getting, one that suggests the ways in which English culture has always coexisted with a range of other cultures in the British Isles. Further, by including the Anglo-Norman writing of Marie de France, we can indicate that English itself is the product of varied cultural and linguistic strands. So far as I know, Marie had never appeared in a modern anthology of British literature, having become the sole property of French departments despite the fact that her very name means Marie from France, a name that no one active in France itself would ever have had.

If we can tell a truer story in this way, we can also challenge our students to see British literary history as offering significant differences from the terms in which the multicultural debate is being played out today--a debate often limited by a self-confirming presentism that gives a two-dimensional cast to discussion and understanding. With this concern in mind, Christopher Baswell and Anne Schotter began their introduction to the medieval period in our anthology by raising precisely the question of linguistic variety, as seen in a quotation from Bede: "At the present time, there are five languages in Britain, just as the divine law is written in five books, all devoted to seeking out and setting forth one and the same kind of wisdom, namely the knowledge of sublime truth and true sublimity. These are the English, British, Irish, Pictish, as well as the Latin languages; through the study of the scriptures, Latin is in general use among them all" (3). In the course of their discussion [End Page 211] of this passage, Baswell and Schotter pointedly caution that this quotation should not be taken as "early medieval multiculturalism," given Bede's fervent wish "to draw his fragmented world into a coherent and transcendent system of Latin-based Christianity." If the peoples of the medieval British Isles struggled with issues of cultural difference that we can appreciate today, they did so in ways very different from ours, ways that can ideally change our sense both of the past and of present possibilities as well.

In developing our anthology, my collaborators and I were hoping not so much to replace an older story with one of our own as to open up a broader range of stories for people to tell using our text. I entirely agree with Karen Saupe that the Longman Anthology "seems not to settle in on a perspective; instead, it attempts to pack in enough material to allow for any and all perspectives." Or at least to allow for a range of perspectives. Equally, as George Drake says, we sought to help people to approach the materials with a variety of methods. In every section we tried to balance socially or politically weighted groupings on issues like slavery or the impact of the French Revolution with sections on aesthetic and literary-historical issues (defenses of poetry; Milton in the Romantic era). Our idea was to show both the cultural grounding of literary expression and also the rhetorical and aesthetic vitality of the larger world of texts within which poems, plays, and novels have been written.

Drake and Saupe admirably show some of the substantial differences that persist between the Longman and the Norton anthologies, but both collections reflect an opening up of the canon and an embrace of all sorts of writers whose voices were little heard before in survey courses. I don't actually think that either anthology is indecisive about canonicity; yet neither is now making the sort of broad claim that Frank Kermode made in the preface to his Oxford Anthology of English Literature in 1973: "The purpose of the Oxford Anthology is to provide students with a selective canon of the entire range of English Literature from the beginnings to recent times" (v). The Longman and the new Norton alike recognize the oxymoronic quality of a "selective canon" and the ever-expanding variousness of "the entire range of English Literature." Both anthologies take a more openly hybrid, even fractal approach to selection and arrangement. The difference between the two anthologies in this respect could best be expressed as follows: in each edition, the Norton presents an established consensus among its editors and its users, while the Longman sees the canon as locally inflected in each classroom and for each reader. We imagine our anthology as evolving not only from one edition to the next but also from classroom to classroom and from year to year, as [End Page 212] people create new juxtapositions and combinations among the materials we provide. Done well, the result is not chaotic randomness but a series of creative variations around the authors and the issues that the anthology presents. If this creativity is often sparked at the local level of an individual classroom, it need not remain an isolated and transient phenomenon. We have now introduced an e-mail newsletter that circulates six times a year among the anthology's adopters, sharing ideas, queries, and discussion among the editors and adopters alike. In this way, the traditional "Instructor's Manual" opens out to an active conversation, helping pedagogy to fulfill its larger scholarly mission--to involve students and teachers together in the excitement and challenge of disciplined inquiry, in an ongoing exploration of an always evolving canon.



David Damrosch is professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He is general editor of The Longman Anthology of British Literature and was a contributing editor of The HarperCollins World Reader. His other books include We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University and Meetings of the Mind.

Note

1. Then again, perhaps the Norton hasn't simply been imitating us in its rapid inclusions of Marie de France, Hogarth, The Beggar's Opera, Frankenstein, and a range of new context groupings whose topics track ours with what may only appear to be beagle-like devotion. The Septuagint was produced by independent translators whose versions all came out alike, and this history may have repeated itself here.

As to format, our own venture into six volumes is more of a revival than an invention, as the Oxford Anthology of English Literature has long existed in six volumes. It came out, though, in 1973, before the two-volume anthologies had grown so unwieldy, and its innovation in format did not suffice to outweigh most teachers' preference for the Norton's selections and editorial matter. Since the Oxford Anthology was never widely adopted, publishers apparently felt reluctant to follow its lead, even though the six volumes offer clear advantages both for student use and for increased course adoptions.

Works Cited for Roundtable

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