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The Am Lit courses are consecutive. One has a course pack rather than anthology, but most of the texts are in Norton so I just bring that, read from that. In class I use the 5th though they're up to 6th now--needless to spend $60+ if you're quick on your feet at finding passages w/o help from page numbers. But I use the 3rd at home, and in my car (where I do most of my reading; daylight's easiest on my eyes, and they don't ticket your car if you're sitting in it--goddamn apocalyptic American campus parking). Why the 3rd? Because it is awesome, especially for 1835-65 when all the good stuff was happening. 200+ densely printed pp each for most of the major figures, not just literary texts but copious letters, diary entries etc. Wonderfully chosen, too: personal favorites--Melville's "The Piazza" and Chola Widow and letters to Hawthorne--"The Over-Soul", "Roger Malvin's Burial" etc.; a terrible crime of the recent editions is the pruning of Melville's poems down to just a couple, and the cutting of all of Emerson's. His and Thoreau's journal selections are long gone... Bryant's down to two poems also, I believe (2!). Between the 2nd and 3rd they had a huge page count jump, as with the English Nortons' 6th...between the 3rd and 4th Theory & Co. started taking over, and the hunger for certain kinds of heroes. All additions, and most omissions, conform to the new interests--with the exception of misguided Moby-Dick excerpts in the recent one; for well-unified (or anyway powerfully cumulative) texts extensive excerpting amounts to gutting--might as well just include the Classics Illustrated version. Sigh. A line in Margaret Fuller's headnote lauding her as one of the age's great minds, but unfortunately not much of a writer, gets the latter bit cut out, in recent editions. And don't get me started about Lydia Stoddard Elizabeth Childs Fern. So it goes. And in the second volume similar butchery is ensuing, with poor Stevens diving back down toward single digit page-count and third-string Harlem Renaissance texts sprouting like mushrooms.

Though Norton is positively holding the line compared to strip-mined literature-as-history anthologies like Heath's, where an introduction to that period is at great pains to deflate Melville as obscurantist to the point of cowardice and Hawthorne as that and worse (Conservative, Woman-hatin', South-lovin', Slaver-lickin'). It's questioned whether they deserve to be considered "major figures" even in quotes, and Harriet Beecher Stowe marches forth as their full peer at the very, very least, and on the whole much more useful and honorable.

Whining aside, I love tissue anthologies. In Fall 1996 I ran through all the plays in Eng. 6, I & II, then most of the poetry in the first half of '97, and that was my great conversion to literature. You can't not read around in them...the authors throw you at one another, in their addresses, attacks and rememberings of one another--through footnote mentions of echoes and borrowings--shared stanza and genre forms--rigidly chronological consecution. And how it's all packed in! When you know which words glow, something better than a Bible.

Bloom's contributions to big Oxford II (smaller vols IV & V) make that one the best of the lot, of course, but that was long before Norton invented paper-slicing lasers or whatever--a mere 900 pages of 19c poetry, much of which he's anthologized elsewhere, before and since. The commentary's probably his high point, in terms of both clarity and condensation, and is startlingly, amazingly apt. But I feel I've said this.

I want to talk about rereading The Scarlet Letter (on my own), literally uncanny after half a lifetime, but I'm losing energy. Some weeks are Julius Caesar-like conspiracies against your freedom to sleep, have you noticed? Exhaustion loosens my tongue but swamps its supply line from my brain.

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I pretty much gave up on the English Lit N.A. when they excised The Triumph of Life. I emailed them to complain when I got some survey or other, and they said I shouldn't worry because it would stay online. Not much help; and then needless to say, they decided not even to keep it up on the web. And the thing is, they (along with Oxford and the Norton Critical Edition) had printed a well-edited version of TL, which now was gone. No one prints TL any more; but I have to say I like the Longman's Victorian Poetry volume (edited by the slightly too clever Valentine Cunningham).

If I were an anthologist....

Pieces like The Vision of Judgment and Samson Agonistes were Greenblatted alongside it--the latter freeing space for the full Paradise Lost, granted, but I think that's a text where extensive excerpts are defensible. And I suppose full presence may ultimately put its neck on the chopping block too, since you can get PL separately for three or five dollars in several editions.

The early Norton editions actually explained why texts were swapped or removed, in the preface, now they just proudly go over their great strides forward.

Actually, looks like they list the full range of omissions, over time here, rather damningly: http://www.wwnorton.com/nael/publication_chronology/the_romantic_period.htm

That Romantic page is the jaw-droppingest. The only omission from a Female Romantic Poet to date has been a Barbauld poem called "Life"...which kind of makes me think it must be good. Look at the 6s and 7s for Wordsworth and Shelley...the Prospectus, the Bay of Lerici, Stanzas Written in Dejection etc. etc. Give it another edition and the lost anthology will be higher quality than the one in print.

Talk the big guy into lobbying Oxford for a new one, or getting Chelsea House to buy a tissue laser.

Or become an anthologist. What would you anthologize?

Actually, spoke too soon. The male Victorians are gutted in 7 and 8. And Jonson, and FQ Bk III, and.

Oh the Anthology.

I'm currently wrestling with AmLit anthologies for the course I'm teaching/designing right now: Honors American Literature, a college-level American survey. So that I can create a packet of readings (since the high school textbooks are downright APPALLING in their dumbed-down, sanitized, censored, terrified-of-potentially-offending-anyone-in-California-or-Texas approach to literature), my school bought me the newest versions of Norton American Anthology and the Heath Anthology, Modern American Poetry (ed. Cary Nelson), plus the study guides and DVD for an online program called "American Passages" (which is basically an attempt to turn the Norton into the Heath, if that makes any sense). From this, I'm supposed to create my American Lit. survey. (Ironically, the classroom sets of novels and novellas I ordered - inexpensive Dover editions of Melville, Crane, H.James, Wharton, G.Stein, Cather, etc. - have yet to arrive and I'm afraid they've been lost in red tape.)

At any rate, even though I have an entire school YEAR (40 weeks, 1 hour a day) to teach this survey, I'm finding the whole process maddening. Scrutinizing the politics of the anthology and the various skirmishes in the canon wars has been my hobby for some years now, and I have countless fantasies and lists for my own personal take on the "perfect" anthology of English, American, and World Literature. But now that I'm faced with the practicalities of figuring out exactly which texts I can conceivably teach within a limited time frame, all of my complicated theories of canon and margin have to be radically revised and even thrown out the window (and here is where I'll admit that my major fault is surely my inability to pick a side in this battle - I'm as fiercely attached to the canonical dead white males as I am committed to resurrecting the marginalized voices of women and other previously excluded groups).

For me, the common denominator in choosing a teachable text has to be a combination of literary value/quality and cultural significance, but frankly, I'm finding myself completely overwhelmed. Which writer? Which text? Which topical cluster? How much time do we spend on each? At this point I cannot IMAGINE having only a univesity semester, or gods forbid, a quarter, to teach the damn thing.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that anyone designing or editing an anthology is going to want the maximum amount of pages and space (which is why they keep getting larger and larger with each new edition), and yet the actual instructor has to deal with the cold reality of time constraints - you only have so many weeks to encapsulate a potentially infinite subject. I'm the type of teacher who could spend the entire year on Whitman and Dickinson alone, and now that I have the freedom to basically teach whatever I want, there's a part of me that is secretly wishing I had LESS great texts to draw upon. I just can't help that I find everything from Emerson's journal entries to Aquah Laluah's poetry endlessly fascinating topics for inquiry and discussion . . .

Not sure where this is all going, but I just finished the fourth week of my second year of teaching, and all of this has been rattling around my head for awhile. Whether all of the above is mere ranting, an attempt to provoke a debate, or a plea for much-needed advice I know not.

- Ryan

I think about teaching a lot, as what I'll be doing soon enough, and because I'm at the point where most of what I'm taught is familiar to me so I start to notice the how. It seems teaching is a lot like parenting: both are crucial, seem theoretically impossible, involve failing every day in every way all over, yet in both any positive gain reverberates forever. What's better than a great class or a real moment with a parent? Not a lot of things.

Probably the thing that will put it together for you is the students. Where are they at, what do they need. If it's Honors and AP they're probably already awake to some big things. Wake them up more. We're doing Walden in both my classes (one of which your students would get credit for after taking yours, which is a bit of a nail in my loser forehead)...and I'm annoyed as much as I admire, having somehow never had contact with this book, but I think it would have been great for me at 17, it's a waker. Emerson's great for that too, especially early Emerson--and in turn early Whitman. I really like that about American literature, how it starts with this burst of youth, from the young--if you skip Hawthorne and Poe, or nudge them forward chronologically, which I kind of advise. That excitement about the world, that trust that something will be found trustworthy...Then all the complexity floods in with Melville and Dickinson and Hawthorne, or later Emerson, later Whitman: how to separate out what's yours and what isn't, in the world. Am I wrong to think that should be Round 2? September lit, then November. To whatever extent that applies in LA.

Teaching the margins, the issues...I wonder how it's best to go about that. So much is unreal to these rising generations that you do want to impress the context on them, give them the necessary American minima which they mostly lack, sketch out the basic material, ethical and philosophical conflicts that are the real heart of the modern world. You get a bit collaterally when you read deep in the major figures, the ones who push through to something both new and basic...but probably not enough. Some texts are helpful; Bartleby and Young Goodman Brown are somehow both humanly and culturally profound, hence their popularity. But past a short list, made shorter by each teacher's inevitable lack of affection for some portion of it, you must be in Sophie's Choice territory.

My 'advice' seems to be taking the same tone and wavering quality as your worries! What would/will I teach...

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Anthologies - my favorite topic

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