(no subject)

[proximoception]

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.

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

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....

Anthologies - my favorite topic

[princenarcissus.livejournal.com]

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