Inclusive Ignorance: The Anthology, English Studies, and Higher Education in the United States

Abstract

And ride in tryumph through Persepolis? Is it not brave to be a king, Techelles? Usumcasane and Theridamas, Is it not passing brave to be a king, And ride in tryumph through Persepolis? (Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Part 1, II.iii) Those programs that embrace engagement, innovation, and assessment and accounta bility, those programs that confirm our commitment to academic primacy and operational excellence will establish the priorities of the University. (Policy statement, Provost of a large state university in the United States) THE genre, if so I may call it, of the literature anthology, particularly those anthologies intended for college1 students and aimed a specific literary periods, has a curious history, especially in the United States. I do not believe that English studies in the rest of the English-speaking world have reached quite the degree of regimentation achieved in the United States and it is almost certainly the model of this country's experience of tertiary education for which these sorts of books have been and are developed. That these three books2 are intended for just such a market is made clear by the general notices for the series in which they appear. The editorial note in Payne and Hunter's volume reads, ‘each volume has been thoroughly researched to meet the current needs of teachers and students’ (ii) and in Braden's ‘… for use on specialist and appropriate survey courses’ (iii). Rumrich and Chaplin's publisher, W. W. Norton, has been a little longer in the classroom anthology business than has Blackwell, and is somewhat more circumspect about direct pedagogical claims and leaves such statements to the solicited puff by David Scott Kastan on the back cover: ‘For the study of seventeenth-century poetry this Norton Critical Edition is exactly what professors want and undergraduates need.’ If the academic model for which these books have been created is that found almost exclusively in the United States, it will be useful to see how that model came to exist.