Making the Cut

When the editors of a new Norton anthology decided which writers to keep and which to drop, they cemented theory's place in the academy

By SCOTT McLEMEE

Advance copies of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism are just about to land on professors' desks. Its arrival will be difficult to overlook: The volume

ALSO SEE: Literary Survivors Colloquy Live: Join a live, online discussion with Vincent B. Leitch, general editor of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, on Thursday, May 3, at 2 p.m., U.S. Eastern time.

is handsomely designed, and enormous. It also sends a message. An anthology of critical theory stamped with the Norton brand name is a sure sign of the field's triumph in English departments.

But last November, a complaint from the publisher threw the whole enterprise into turmoil. After five years of often grueling labor, the project seemed to be complete. It offered annotated selections from more than 160 authors, covering 25 centuries of ideas about literature and culture. By any standard, it was a monumental book. And that was, in a sense, exactly the problem.

Once typeset, the anthology was almost 2,900 pages long -- about 500 more than W. W. Norton expected. The publisher contacted the volume's general editor, Vincent B. Leitch, a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. He would need to reduce the bulk by at least 300 pages, to keep the book affordable for classroom use.

"When I heard the news," Mr. Leitch says, "I was numb for about a week. I didn't even contact the other editors. I just walked around thinking, 'How are we going to do this?'"

Eventually, he asked each of the five other editors to nominate two or three figures to cut from the book. That would at least get the unpleasant task over with quickly. But to Mr. Leitch's surprise, his colleagues wanted to decide on changes as a group. They drew up lists of candidates for exclusion, arguing passionately along the way.

"All of us were hurting as we saw favorites disappear," recalls William E. Cain, a professor of English at Wellesley College. The selections from George Eliot and I. A. Richards that he had edited didn't survive. But the process, while contentious, remained friendly. "Nobody got mad," reports Laurie A. Finke, director of women's and gender studies at Kenyon College. "Of course, I would have been happier if we had made the cuts before I spent all that time in the library" working on authors who didn't survive. At the last minute, she sacrificed her annotated texts by one of her favorites, Bernardus Silvestris, a medieval theorist of allegory.

After two weeks of debate and intellectual horse-trading, a new table of contents emerged. Twenty-one thinkers, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Elaine Showalter, vanished from the collection entirely; selections from three others were trimmed.

The last-minute crisis in November had turned into an impromptu seminar on which figures are absolutely essential in contemporary literary study. But once the anthology itself appears, the real debate will begin. Mr. Cain anticipates countless conversations along the lines of "I can't believe they included A, B, C, yet left out X, Y, Z!"

The anthology poses bigger questions, too. Can the range of ideas covered by the term "theory" be reduced to the dimensions of an anthology, however sizable? Many of the works included were controversial when they began appearing in graduate seminars 20 or 30 years ago; now, in a Norton anthology, they are clearly part of the undergraduate curriculum. Should they be?

Norton thinks so; and given the market, it's a settled question. Peter Simon, the Norton editor in charge of the anthology, estimates that 12,000 students a year take courses on the history of criticism or contemporary theoretical approaches to literature. The Norton name will lend prominence to theory, and vice versa. The publisher hopes that the new volume will improve sales of its other classroom offerings among younger faculty members, who sometimes regard Norton's well-known literature anthologies as hidebound and dull.

Staff members at Norton first thought of adding a criticism collection to the press's stable of literary anthologies more than a dozen years ago. In the 1970's, developments including structuralism, feminist analysis, and postmodern philosophy began provoking debate in literature departments; by the late 1980's, a flood of theory collections began hitting the academic market. Many were strong on contemporary trends but skimped on the work of previous centuries; others had important texts in lackluster translations. From discussions with professors, the sales staff in Norton's textbook division sensed that a more comprehensive and authoritative collection would find a ready niche.

The publisher considered, and declined, a number of proposals for an anthology before contacting Mr. Leitch, the author of American Literary Criticism From the 1930s to the 1980s (Columbia University Press, 1988), which has been translated into Hungarian, Japanese, and Korean. Mr. Leitch signed a contract with Norton in 1995, and recruited Mr. Cain, who had written The Crisis in Criticism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984) and a volume on teaching theory to undergraduates, and Barbara Johnson, a professor of English and comparative literature at Harvard University, who is known for her early work on deconstruction and feminist criticism, and more recently for her work on African-American literature. Another early recruit was Jeffrey J. Williams, an associate professor of English at the University of Missouri at Columbia and a widely published theorist, who exercised influence on the Norton anthology even before starting to work on it.

Both Mr. Simon and Mr. Leitch had been impressed by Mr. Williams's essay "Packaging Theory," which appeared in the journal College English in 1994. In it, he suggested that the recent spate of anthologies revealed something important: The field known as "theory" (which he defined broadly as "speculation on language, interpretation itself, society, gender, culture, and so on") was no longer just one specialty within literary studies. Rather, he argued, theory had become an essential part of the discipline. It was "a body of professional lore that functions to distinguish those inside the profession" -- while also providing a "marketing concept" for new journals, articles, conferences, and courses.

Through the mid-1980's, scholars who "did theory" had been an embattled minority, championing ideas from philosophy, psychoanalysis, and other fields that challenged the foundations of literary study. But those days of stridency were over, Mr. Williams said. Furthermore, the entrenchment of theory had yielded a curious side effect. All those mind-bendingly transgressive thinkers now formed a sort of tradition -- a canon of classical figures. The appearance of more than a dozen anthologies in the late 1980's and early 1990's, Mr. Williams wrote, rendered theory "accessible, portable, and eminently teachable."

Those qualities were exactly what Norton had in mind. But the process of assembling the volume also involved accepting Mr. Williams's other point: It made sense to treat theory not just as a development in intellectual history, but as something that was now embedded in the everyday practice of the profession.

The publisher had assembled a group of about 50 authors, synthesized from existing anthologies, to form the core table of contents. Mr. Leitch added the names of another 250 theorists to consider. In the summer of 1996, the editorial team started winnowing down Mr. Leitch's list and choosing specific texts. Most of the time, the team reached consensus; when that failed, a vote was taken, with a selection needing the support of at least three editors to get in.

In 1997, after "innumerable" rounds of discussion, a proposed table of contents was vetted by five outside readers. "These were midcareer people who teach theory," Mr. Leitch notes, "who could foresee problems in using the anthology in the classroom." That year, with a firm sense of just how much work remained to be done, he added two more editors to the group: Kenyon's Ms. Finke, a medievalist who works in women's studies, and John McGowan, a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ms. Finke had co-edited an earlier theory collection, while Mr. McGowan jokes that his department is known as "the Norton Annex," because so many of his colleagues have worked on the publisher's anthologies.

Over the next two years, the editorial team continued to fine-tune the list of selections, while also preparing annotations, bibliographies, and extensive headnotes to place the theorists into historical context and guide students through sometimes exceptionally dense arguments. Ms. Finke recalls the "brutal" experience of finishing a headnote per week during the summer of 1999 -- a period the editors nicknamed "theory boot camp." The challenge was theoretical as well as practical: At the convention of the Modern Language Association in December 2000, several of the editors appeared on a panel to discuss the headnote as a discursive genre. After all, if critical theory had taught scholars to question the focus on cultural authorities, what do you say in a thumbnail biography?

As the unique product of intellectual history and polling data, the finished Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism contains a few surprises. Particularly striking is the abundance of medieval work. In recent decades, theorists such as Northrop Frye and Fredric Jameson (also included in the volume) have revived interest in the medieval idea that texts have multiple yet interconnected layers of meaning. Besides writings by familiar literary figures such as Dante and Boccaccio, the anthology includes selections from Hugh of St. Victor (an 11th-century champion of polysemic textuality) and Geoffrey of Vinsauf (a leading 13th-century theorist of avant-garde poetry).

Ms. Finke, who prepared the medieval selections, is especially proud to have included Moses Maimonides, a 12th-century rabbi writing in Arabic as well as Hebrew, whose work falls outside more familiar classical and Christian models of textual interpretation.

About half of the anthology is devoted to 20th-century figures, and that is where the selections get controversial. Michel Foucault's analysis of the penal system, Jacques Lacan's essay on "the mirror stage" in psychological development, and Donna Haraway's speculations on "the cyborg" (all included) have become standard readings in the theory canon. (Anti-theorists would point out that none of them focus on literary texts.) Work that did not survive last November's final winnowing includes such traditional landmarks of literary scholarship as Erich Auerbach's legendary study Mimesis (1946) and F. R. Leavis's The Great Tradition (1948), a cranky but influential account of the English novel. A strong multicultural emphasis is evident in selections from Zora Neale Hurston, Frantz Fanon, and Gloria Anzaldua; while recent developments in queer theory are represented by extracts from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler.

Among figures born after 1935, more than half are female. "A great deal of the most influential or innovative criticism in recent decades is by women," says Mr. Leitch. "Our table of contents shows that fortuitously. We didn't say, 'Oh, we're going to have 60 percent women.'"

"People who look from the outside think of anthologists as creating a canon," notes Mr. Cain, "with the power to decide what should get taught and what shouldn't. We had a very energetic process of debate, with editors being stalwart advocates for given theorists. But we also had to keep in mind the concerns of instructors who had indicated critics and pieces they wanted."

As central as Mr. Cain finds the work of William Empson, whose book Seven Kinds of Ambiguity influenced generations of English professors, the market forces were not on his side. "There were a lot of constraints," Mr. Cain notes, "certainly more than I expected coming in."

With its copious annotations, the Norton anthology is designed to introduce both graduate students and upper-division English majors to the rigors of contemporary literary study. But thereby hangs a controversy. Given all the demands on the undergraduate attention span (that scarcest of academic resources), should professors be teaching Hayden White's "The Historical Text as Literary Artifact" to students who have spent more time surfing the World Wide Web than reading novels?

The "professionalizing" of academic literary studies worries Morris Dickstein, author of Double Agent: The Critic and Society (Oxford University Press, 1992), who teaches English and film at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York. The new Norton, he says, "claims to be an anthology of theory and criticism, but it contains very little actual criticism." He finds the table of contents discouraging: "Criticism implies some engagement with writing, but there's almost none of that here. Norton anthologies have always been about literature. This reflects a really unfortunate trend toward the study of ideas about ideas about literature. It's metacriticism, really."

Mr. Dickstein admits that his complaint does not apply to the first half of the 2,500-page volume. But the 20th-century works tend to be mainly familiar to (and sometimes written explicitly for) an academic audience. "There are only two or three figures here from recent decades who aren't of strictly professional interest," he says.

Mr. Dickstein contends that the anthology manages the neat trick of being both trendy and 10 years out of date. "It doesn't reflect the widespread discontent with theory in recent years, even within the university," he says.

In fact, the editors did make some effort to represent such complaints. Jane Tompkins's essay "Me and My Shadow" invokes her sense that obligatory conceptual sophistication left her critical writing emotionally barren. Barbara Christian's "The Race for Theory" argues that African-American literary study is heading down a poststructuralist dead end. And the anthology includes a substantial excerpt from a famous manifesto by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, "Against Theory."

It is true, however, that the anthology omits examples of what is sometimes called "practical criticism" or "close reading" -- essays interpreting particular works of literature.

"It is very difficult to include examples of close reading for the obvious reason that instructors and students likely will not know the particular works being analyzed," says Mr. Cain, with a note of regret. "I wish students were more widely read. But given the situation, I think it's necessary and inevitable that the volume is more focused on theory than on practical criticism."

Mr. Leitch points out that treating critical theory as simply a tool kit for literary analysis is very much a thing of the past. "People do it," he says, "but most theorists don't teach [the subject] that way." He stresses that the Norton volume is the only theory anthology accompanied by an instructor's manual (prepared by M. Keith Booker of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville), available this fall. Having spent more than $70,000 to secure permissions, the publisher is banking on the anthology's becoming an indispensable fixture in literature departments.

"Criticism," Mr. Leitch maintains, no longer means "belletristic" essays by figures such as Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin, who wrote for an educated readership outside the university. Instead, Norton is marketing the book to young teachers -- and more experienced instructors who do not want to be hopelessly behind the times -- who may need help to guide their students through Gayatri Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" should the occasion arise.

While the anthology reflects changes in classrooms, its publication may also mark a shift in what "theory" means within the profession. As Mr. McGowan says, the anthology "codifies theory as it's been institutionalized. And you can only codify something when you can talk about it in the past tense -- when you can say, 'That is what it was.'"

Mr. McGowan points out that a great deal of work in critical theory reflects the influence of social and political movements that emerged in the 60's. Various schools of thought now taught as "theory" offered comprehensive models of the culture. And often, those conflicted. (A Marxist stressing class, a feminist thinking about gender-as-system, and a postcolonialist emphasizing cultural imperialism would bring very different concerns to reading Nadine Gordimer's novels about South Africa.) Any serious theorist was looking for definitive concepts and rigorous analyses. "Pluralism" was a bad word.

"The stringent tone of 'high theory' doesn't resonate with graduate students now, at least not in the same way," observes Mr. McGowan. "The apocalyptic mood has faded. There has been some kind of sensibility change."

Another perspective emerges from a recent volume called The Theory Mess: Deconstruction in Eclipse (Columbia University Pres, 2001), by Herman Rapaport, a professor of English at Britain's University of Southampton. "We seem to be living at a time when it is more professionally advantageous to tolerate wildly differing views within a supermarket of ideas than to insist on some kind of intellectual reckoning," he writes. Mr. Rappaport laments the watering-down of deconstruction and calls for theorists to grapple seriously with Derrida.

Meanwhile, back at the supermarket, the Norton anthology will be available to professors at a discount until the end of August. (At $25, that's a buck a century.) To some people, it will look like a fairly sinister monument -- embodying theory's reputation as mad, bad, and dangerous to know. To others, it may inspire nostalgia: a remembrance of the day when photocopying essays from the journal Diacritics felt like a first step toward cultural subversion. Encountering the same ideas today, in Norton's pages, with all those footnotes, makes the study of theory feel as familiar and wholesome as a trip to the salad bar.

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