"The Norton Anthology of English Literature" celebrates its 50th anniversary.
Dialogue
Built to Last
By
M. H. ABRAMS and STEPHEN GREENBLATT
Published: August 23, 2012
Fifty years ago this fall, undergraduates were assigned
their first Norton Anthology, often the only required text for a college
freshman’s survey of English literature. Here, M. H. Abrams, the
founding general editor, and Stephen Greenblatt, the current general
editor, discuss the history of the anthology, the challenges facing
English literature survey courses and the enduring question, Why study
literature?
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
How much has the anthology changed over the years?
M. H. Abrams: It’s gotten bigger. Unfortunately,
there’s a limit to that. The important thing is that the student be able
to carry it to class and read it anywhere, including under a tree as
the original preface said. I think we still do say that.
Stephen Greenblatt: We still do indeed say that in your honor, even though I don’t know how many trees have been cut to make it possible.
Abrams: When I undertook the original job of general
editor, I thought of it as the work of one clear summer. Well, it was
four very hard-working years before the thing finally appeared. And it’s
a difficult project. But it’s worthwhile because you’re presenting
literature to students, many of them for the first time. And when you
succeed you’ve done something very important and very satisfying.
Greenblatt: The anthology changes, but it is meant to
last. Even now in its somewhat bulky form, people keep their Norton
Anthology for their whole lives. And they do that for a reason. They do
it because they sense that it’s not something that just comes and goes.
They trust it and want to return to it. That’s something again that our
culture has too little of and that the anthology has passionately
served.
Abrams: One of the pleasures of being an editor of the
anthology is to meet middle-aged people who say: “I still have the
Norton Anthology that I used 20 years ago. I have it at my bed’s head,
and I read it at night, and I enjoy it.” It’s a pleasure that you don’t
outgrow the anthology. It’s oriented toward undergraduates, but it’s
used by graduate students in preparing for their oral examinations. It
continues to be read by people who were introduced to it 20, 25, 30
years ago in their classes. That’s a great joy for an editor.
The Norton Anthology plays a crucial role in a humanities
curriculum that is said to be under great pressure. Have you noticed the
effects of this pressure?
Greenblatt: Of course we have noticed. The issue is not
so much the anthology, but rather the fate of the whole enterprise of
studying what Matthew Arnold called the best which has been thought and
said in the world. For generations that enterprise occupied a key place
in college and university education everywhere, but there are signs that
it is in trouble. Humanities departments are fretting about a decline
in majors, and those students who do major in literature, art,
philosophy and history often clamor only for contemporary topics.
Has the Norton Anthology then lost its relevance?
Greenblatt: Not at all. The Norton Anthology was based
on the idea that it actually matters to plunge into a comic masterpiece
written in the 1300s or to weep at a tragedy performed in the 1700s.
What would it mean for a culture to give up on its past? It is vitally
important to remind people that the humanities carry the experience, the
life-forms of those who came before us, into the present and into the
future. Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and
we can speak back to them. Besides — as many studies have shown —
cultural knowledge turns out to be good for your career.
You have noted a turn away from the past among students and
their teachers. Are there signs of a counter-trend back toward the
basics?
Greenblatt: When I teach a course with my colleague
Louis Menand that starts with Homer and goes up to Joyce, the pressure
on enrollment is huge, because it turns out many students — without the
compulsion of their teachers — feel that they really shouldn’t go
through their undergraduate years without reading the great imaginative
works of the past.
Abrams: One of the joys of teaching with the anthology
is to watch the excitement grow as students, who may think the past dull
and irrelevant, find how fresh and new and powerful are the kinds of
writings that are hundreds of years old.
Greenblatt: Amen to that.
What texts have been particularly painful to remove from the print edition.
Abrams: I love the Romantic period, and I developed a
corpus of texts to be included, which I thought were indispensable. It
turned out that there was not room for more than half of what I
proposed. Every removal was like pulling a tooth. But I finally gave in
to the common good.
Greenblatt: I love certain long Renaissance poems such
as George Gascoigne’s “Woodmanship.” We included it; very few people
taught it; so out it came. But my pain was alleviated because we now
offer the poem in a fully annotated, completely teachable downloadable
form in the supplemental e-book. The situation that Mike faced when he
revised the anthology — when something comes out of the print pages, it
ceases to circulate — is not the situation we’re in now. So we can make
practical decisions as to what is most teachable and usable and at the
same time not give up those things we feel passionately about but that
may not be for everyone.
For a prospective undergraduate reading this Q. and A., how would you answer the question, Why study literature?
Abrams: Ha — Why live? Life without literature is a
life reduced to penury. It expands you in every way. It illuminates what
you’re doing. It shows you possibilities you haven’t thought of. It
enables you to live the lives of other people than yourself. It broadens
you, it makes you more human. It makes life enjoyable. There’s no end
to the response you can make to that question, but Stephen has a few
things to add.
Greenblatt: Literature is the most astonishing
technological means that humans have created, and now practiced for
thousands of years, to capture experience. For me the thrill of
literature involves entering into the life worlds of others. I’m from a
particular, constricted place in time, and I suddenly am part of a huge
world — other times, other places, other inner lives that I otherwise
would have no access to.
Abrams: Yes. Literature makes life much more worth living.
Greenblatt: You speak with the full wisdom of your hundred years of life.
Abrams: That’s portentous enough.
M. H. Abrams is the founding editor of “The Norton Anthology of
English Literature.” Stephen Greenblatt, the current general editor, is
the John Cogan university professor of the humanities at Harvard and
author, most recently, of “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.”
