The Heath Anthology On the Airwaves

Earlier this fall, reporter Bruce Robertson and radio station WAMC (in Albany, NY) produced a program on the Heath Anthology of American Literature, featuring interviews with Paul Lauter, Paul Smith, and Cathy Davidson. The program, titled "The Best of Our Knowledge," aired on more than two dozen radio stations around the United States in early October. A transcript follows:

Bruce Robertson reports on the controversy and the excitement surrounding publication of the new Heath Anthology of American Literature.

Bruce Robertson:

The new book being used widely is actually a two-volume set of more than 5,000 pages published by D. C. Heath and Company. Coordinating editor of the Heath Anthology was Paul Lauter, also a professor of English at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Lauter says the anthology is the end product of a project called Reconstructing American Literature begun by The Feminist Press in the late 1970s. During this time, he says, some academics developed a sense that the American canon, the accepted collection of literature, simply was not complete.

Paul Lauter:

When I was in graduate school in the 1950s and as an undergraduate, too, at very good universities-New York University, Indiana University, and Yale-in that time I studied the works of one American woman writer-Emily Dickinson-and a couple of poems by Marianne Moore and in coursework, one book by a black American writer, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. I never had in any of my courses work by Richard Wright or Langston Hughes or even James Baldwin, people I read on my own. And of course I had never read or studied work by Asian American writers or Hispanic writers or American Indian writers. Insofar as American Indian writers were concerned, for example, or American Indian culture, you would read that in anthropology but not in literature.

Bruce Robertson:

Mr. Lauter, I think some of the controversy that has swirled around this may be due in part to something of a confusion in how the anthology has been presented. In other words, is this intended to be an offering of the best writing or just simply a sampling of some of the kinds of writing that has been done and offered over the years?

Paul Lauter:

It's a complicated question, because it depends on what you mean by "best". But let me put it this way, an anthology is like a museum. And no museum hangs nothing but masterpieces. If you go to the Metropolitan Museum, there are lots of paintings hung there and lots of objects to look at that are not necessarily masterpieces. They're there because they're interesting for a whole variety of reasons. We were interested not in presenting only masterpieces, even if we could come to an agreement about what constitutes a masterpiece- and there's a lot of disagreement about that. There are those who would argue that in the whole history of American literature there is nothing that is indisputably a masterpiece. So we were interested not only in these very few so-called masterpieces, we were interested in presenting the whole range of the cultures of the United States and of the northern part of the Americas before that so that students and our colleagues could see what that culture looked like or what those cultures looked like, how they interact, how they influence each other, and also could see how these varieties of cultures reshape the way in which you think about the traditional works on which many of us were trained in the 50s and 60s.

Bruce Robertson:

Now as any author will testify, it is one thing to have a great idea for a book, and quite another to get a publisher to see that greatness-to say nothing of the difficulties of signing a contract to publish. However, in this case, the project's organizers had a friend in Paul Smith, a senior editor at D. C. Heath and Company, a textbook publishing company in Lexington, Massachusetts. Smith helped set up three criteria by which the book's contents would be judged.

Paul Smith:

First of all, the works, in and of themselves, had to have some literary value. In some cases, this was an undeniable and very high literary value. But in some cases, another aspect might also be of interest, and that is that a text provides an interesting gloss on some of the other writing that's being done in a particular period or a counterpoint to the approach or the theme or the point of view of some of this other material. And finally, there was a pedagogical goal that the material we chose for inclusion was something that taught well, it was something that would get students engaged in lively discussions about literature, about literary value even, something that typically hadn't been discussed much before in these classes. People would just give students a list of the so-called great writers and that was the end of that part of the discussion. It was assumed that these works were great, and their greatness or their value was not often challenged. Now, with this new range of writers, people could talk about relative standards of aesthetic value or of literary value or of historical value.

Bruce Robertson:

Historical value maybe, but this project has stirred up a lot of controversy on another front. Smith mentioned that the older canon was always presented to students with the assumption that the literature was undeniably great. The controversy swirling around this project consists of two arguments. First of all, is the purpose of an anthology to present great works, and if so, great by whose standards? Those who argue against this project say that an anthology presents works that have achieved greatness by the test of time. Those who favor this new collection argue that an anthology should present a sampling of what is out there, letting the reader decide what stays and what goes. In fact, speaking now as a professor who would teach this material, Paul Lauter says,

Paul Lauter:

It turns out that some of the works, many of the works, indeed, that had been neglected, turn out to be quite wonderful and indeed are masterpieces, if one still insists on using that term. For example, "The Yellow Wall-paper"; for example, Rebecca Harding Davis' "Life in the Iron-Mills" which was unavailable until about twenty years ago. It was just not in print. Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper," the same thing. Stories by Charles Chesnutt; I happen to be teaching some of these now. Or Kate Chopin's stories. Twenty or twenty-five years ago they were all unknown. I think what students discover is that the credential that we give something by calling it a masterpiece-or even more limited by calling it literature-that that credential needs to be much more widely distributed over many, many works.

Bruce Robertson:

Lauter here argues that by reading widely the students can then form a more sustainable opinion about what they like, what works for them and also about who they are as individuals moving forward in time with other individuals. Professor of English at Duke University, Cathy Davidson, one of the consultants for the Heath collection, says anthologies are meant to change with the times. She has reserved at the library two shelves of anthologies for use in comparative teaching.

Cathy Davidson:

And if you look in any of these anthologies, you realize it's a mixed bag, it's a mixture of both the best and what's out there. There are always compromises in any period between history and aesthetics.

Bruce Robertson:

(Davidson) says we tend to make judgments about what is good and what is not based on the kind of reading that we are doing.

Cathy Davidson:

For example, if you pick up a mystery novel, you might not want gripping emotional experiences. You know that the genre of a mystery novel is about ratiocination. You know that your mind is going to be what's at play and great enjoyment and appreciation and aesthetic judgment of that work comes from how much it teases your mind. By contrast, if you're reading a work such as what's included in the Heath Anthology such as Rebecca Harding Davis' "Life in the Iron-Mills," unless you get a lump in your throat when you're reading that, and unless there are moments when you feel moved almost to the point of tears, that work doesn't work for you; it's not an aesthetic work.

Bruce Robertson:

Having used and taught from two shelves of anthologies throughout her career, Davidson says this collection may be one of the best.

Cathy Davidson:

I would say that the Heath Anthology, more than any other single textbook that I've ever seen, says to the reader: OK, this is one version of American literature. How do you like it? It asks essentially a pedagogical question: what is American literary history? How do we make American literary history? And it also, and this is not a contradictory question, says: And in the process of answering that question (what is American literary history) isn't it neat that you're reading an awful lot of wonderful writers that you have never read before and perhaps have never even heard of before?

Bruce Robertson:

Professor Cathy Davidson of Duke University, speaking highly of the Heath Anthology of American Literature, published by D. C. Heath and Company. It is not likely to show up in your favorite bookstore but rest assured that at least some of the nation's college-level students are getting a chance to read some new and potentially classic works. This is Bruce Robertson.