"It is tiresome to hear education discussed, tiresome to educate, and tiresome to be educated." -- attributed to William Lamb
I ain't going to lie to you (yet): the following essay is going to be la-tee-dah in the extreme. It will address issues that don't matter one whit to saving whales (well, maybe the Welsh). In fact, what I'm going to write about may be too precious to even be called for book lovers. I am going to address a dilemma I face as an English. . . teacher. . . in choosing a literature anthology, and it's not the dilemma you might suspect.
You see, there are various problems with history as a discipline. This does not mean that history is bunk, as Mr. Ford said, but it does mean that no choice about an historical approach is scientific or pure or righteous.
Anthologies are collections -- "little flowers," if you're an ancient Greek -- of literary pieces. The king of anthologies at present is the
Norton Anthology of __ Literature. However, the "Norton" in that title simply means the publisher. Other publishers make their own anthologies. For a good kick, look at
The Brand X Anthology of Poetry, which is a parody of the "Nortie."
Anthologies have guiding philosophies in their selections. In addition to the much vexed and cursed "canon," each series editor brings a philosophy of selection to bear, and this is what I wish to speak to today. When I choose an anthology, I have to choose a philosophy that supports my goals.
"A well-read fool is the most pestilent of blockheads: his learning is a flail which he knows not how to handle, and with which he breaks his neighbor's shins as well as his own." -- August III the Saxon, King of Poland, 1763.
The Norton Anthology of English Literature this time out has Stephen Greenblatt as a general editor. Greenblatt is best known to literature scholars as the one-man band of New Historicism. New Historicism is difficult to explain in an essay, and it's even harder to explain in a sentence or two, but "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread," and I'm dumber than they are, so here it goes. Power in a society flows and exercises its direct effects through language. While explicit effects, such as coercion and capital exchange are power markers, the informal exchanges of power that limit knowledge and desire are encoded in language, and the language people use organizes their personae in the play of power. Thus, each person is constructing a resistant self, a pose, against power in metaphors of freedom or control.
Well, I made a mess of that, but it hardly matters. Dr. Greenblatt's organization of the Norton is to present the "canon" and to offer shaping discourses for the canonical writers. This is a standard practice for anthologies in this theoretically aware age. In the enormous range of the whole NAEL (covering the years 800 - 2000), the various ages get supplements online and in the book. The philosophy shows up in how and what the supplementary material is.
In, let's say, the Renaissance, we get More, Wyatt the Elder (a cool cat, folks), "Faith in Conflict" (Tyndale, Geneva, Douay-Rheims, KJV Bibles; Tyndale, More, Calvin, Askew, Foxe), "Women in Power" (Mary I, Jane Grey, Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth), etc. In the "17th century," the additions are "Gender Relations: Conflict and Counsel" and "Inquiry and Experience."
I used this anthology and liked it. However, the organization is teleological. Essentially, the volumes place "canon" and "comment" into generous sections, but the choices for both are shaped by the concerns of the present. In the early Renaissance, would citizens have seen themselves as experiencing "faith in conflict?" Would that have been an interesting study, or would they have instead put "Catholic authors" against "Puritain authors" against "Establishment authors?" Would Elizabeth have favored "women in power," or would she have wanted that heading obliterated in favor of a divine sovereignty? In the 17th century, I feel fairly certain that "gender relations" were not thought of, much less counseled or in conflict.
In other words, we are interested now, and rightly so, in the development of gender. We are interested now, rightly, in how faith could be both an external and internal power driving and oppressing people. We are interested in these issues. Stephen Duck, who is a sad, charming, and poignant individual, but not much of a poet, shows up in the 18th century set because he was a working class poet, while Robert Gould, who was an orphaned servant and poet does not, because he never stood for the laborer.
Teleological history is "end first" history. It looks at history as a story of how we got to here. It thus ignores strands that did not lead to us, and it pays exaggerated interest in those elements that seem "pre-modern" in the historical narrative. For an anthology designed for pedagogy, Greenblatt's choices are appropriate. The NAEL is the base platform from which tens of thousands of students will make their first jumps into writing a critical analysis.
Now for honesty: I don't like this arrangement one little bit. At the same time, I will use it for each survey class I teach. However, when I teach a class on a specific era, out it goes.
I'm teaching my own field this Fall, the 18th century. For it, I have chosen the Longman Anthology edited by Leo Damrosch. It is organized with a different, but still quite discernible, historical assumption, the dialectical approach.
Eighteenth-century British literature is overwhelmingly topical. Imagine watching "Saturday Night Live" from 1975 in the year 2175. Imagine reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in 2090. The writers of the Restoration through the 1740's were, for whatever reason, no fan of the lyric poem. They looked to Horace, among the ancients, and not Pindar or Sappho. Horace's Ars Poetica is a practical book, from a working poet, and his advice on decorum, on the usefulness of poetry to society, was conventional wisdom. Poetry, plays, essays, and novels were all to help society, either with seriousness or "wit."
Now, there's something strange about satire. Satire is like a painting of someone choking the life out of a devil. Even though the point is the killing of the devil, that devil gets painted in. In other words, satires reiterate or recreate their enemies if only as "invisible complements" to their business. Imagine reading Animal Farm with no knowledge of the Soviet Union. The notes would explain the allegory, and your only knowledge of the real Lenin and Stalin would be the satirical recreation.
In context, pink is a dream.
The Longman's supplementals are writings from the enemies of the authors who became canonical. In common parlance, we call these "the dunces." However, the authors whom Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, for example, opposed were not stupid. More to the point, whether they were stupid or not,
they won. Robert Walpole, for example, was England's first prime minister, although the title did not exist. He served as PM for decades, and he was as divisive as Margaret Thatcher, easily. He used spying, planted stories in the press, and used the royal family's fears and feuds to keep himself and his party in permanent power. He was also the architect, more than anyone else, of "warehouse London," of turning England into a middleman taking a cut of money for all goods going West -- whether to North America or South America. He was one of the early architects of capitalism in the U.K. as well. Most notoriously, he had a
portion of the national debt transferred into private corporate stock, which then crashed.
The history of England after 1714 is essentially Whig, and yet many of the canonical writers are either explicitly or ideologically conservative.
Should we seek out female authors without a readership in the period simply for their sex? I hope no one would say yes. Should we over-emphasize the excellent Olaudah Equiano, when he hadn't much company? (You can read his autobiography at the link, and The Geogrebob says, "Yep.") The argument over abolition in England was largely a later matter, and, when it was held, a great deal of sweet-sounding hypocrisy was had.
If we accept that there is a "greatness" in the canonical authors like Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, then it exists in tension with its antagonist. In the dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, we can see culture being manufactured. This is why, even though the Longman under-represents Mary Manley, Inchbald, and the vigorous female presence in the press, I go with the Longman here.
In a given era, I think it is appropriate not to look at "what parts we're interested in," but "what they were interested in" so as to better understand why they coped with their world the way they did. In the case of a polemical and satirical age, the actual subject the authors are concerned with is in between what is spoken by the sides.
Take a look at your old anthology, if you are past the age of anthologies, or think about the table of contents, if you are still selecting, and consider the question: Does this volume serve our interests by offering us texts that fit our current anxieties, or does it present the past's anxieties and thus serve our interests?