For more information, consult the College Division at Houghton Mifflin’s home page: www.hmco.com.

THE HEATH ANTHOLOGYOF AMERICAN LITERATURESpring 1998 • Number 17

n e w s l e t t e r

For the past few years I’ve signed myemail with the above Web link, which

leads the curious to a home page atPrinceton, listing seven online courses I’vebuilt. All of these efforts are modest: theyhave limited graphics, no whirling GIFS orWeb counters. Mostly they are text, blueoceans of it, listing Web links for hundredsof sites that offer research information,online texts, and collections of relevantimages. My Web sites are simply referencedesks, organized to complement the read-ings I have assigned for classes.

When I began to compile these sites in 1994,my colleagues in English were baffled andmy only campus support came from thecomputing center, which gave some moneyto fund a summer graduate assistant. Itaught her to surf the Web, using “crawler”engines that now seem antiquated, and shebrought me bookmarks, which I organizedin an outlining word processor. Then Itediously coded in HTML, learning by trialand error how to set type in the cyber-equiv-alent of a hand letterpress.

Today the business of writing Web pages hasvastly speeded up, and I am no longer ananomaly in a department that sports its own Web page and lists every course online.The tools for searching and writing havegreatly improved: now I search with myown engine, appropriately named“Retriever,” and I store thousands of book-marks in a private database, called “SurfScout” (a subset of Panorama, by ProVUEDevelopment). In practical terms, these toolslet me quickly look for topics, secure Webaddresses, and build pages in an HTML edi-tor (PageMill). In about three hours, I canprepare a complete set of links for a lectureor seminar.

Yet that efficiency of production does notmake teaching any easier or less daunting.How should we use the Web in our class-

rooms? Over the years, I’ve conducted vari-ous teaching experiments. Sometimes in lec-tures I project Web sites to show images ortexts—but in truth, a 35—mm slide projectordoes a better job. In seminars I have also dis-played Web pages, but generally to makebrief discussion points. The Web is less use-ful in these situations because it interfereswith the high bandwidth of human conver-sation, distracting us with a technology thatremains slow, cumbersome, and all tooprone to system bombs.

For me, the Web works best as a supplementto classes, which students may consultbefore or after our discussions, especiallywhen preparing to write. In most of mycourses, I ask students to submit emailresponses to each week’s reading, due a fewhours before the discussion class. These Iprint and annotate, using them as a basis forguiding our conversation. I thus know inadvance what students think about the read-ing, where they have problems and blindspots, and what points of disagreement maybe useful to explore. I also have somethingin prose from every student, including allthose sphinxes who refuse to speak in anopen forum.

At first, I ask the students to write privatelyto me, then after a few weeks I direct their

Teaching with Web Sitesby William Howarth http://www.princeton.edu/~howarth

Heritage. How have we

come from our savage

past, how no longer to be

savages—this to teach. To

look back and learn what

humanizes—this to teach.

—Tillie Lerner Olsen,“Tell Me a Riddle”

e d i t o r i a l b o a r d

Paul LauterTrinity College(General Editor)

Richard YarboroughUniversity of California—Los Angeles(Associate General Editor)

Juan Bruce-NovoaUniversity of California—Irvine

Jackson BryerUniversity of Maryland

Elaine Hedges1927 - 1997

Amy LingUniversity of Wisconsin—Madison

Wendy MartinThe Claremont Graduate School

Charles MolesworthQueens College—CUNY

Carla MulfordPennsylvania State University

Raymund ParedesUniversity of California—Los Angeles

Anne G. JonesUniversity of Florida—Gainesville

Linda Wagner-MartinUniversity of North Carolina—Chapel Hill

Andrew WigetNew Mexico State University

Sandra A. ZagarellOberlin College

(continued on page 3)

Inside this issue 1997 Student Essay Contest winning essays

I plan to take full advantageof the stunning Web sitecreated to support the latestHeath Anthology.

Houghton Mifflin Company • College Division • 222 Berkeley Street • Boston, MA • 021162

Randy Bass of Georgetown University‘s English Department created the web site that accompanies

The Heath Anthology of American Literature. He is theEditor of Electronic Resources for The Heath Anthologyand the Director of the Center for Electronic Projects in American Culture Studies (CEPACS). He is the authorof Border Texts: Cultural Readings for Contemporary Writers,which will be published by Houghton Mifflin Companyin November 1998.

(Teaching with Web Sites, continued from front cover)

To join an online discussion about Will Howarth’s article, visit the Heath Anthology Web site. Click on English at:

http://www.hmco.com/college

3

mail to a class “e-list,” in which all submis-sions are read by all subscribers. Now theyare reading and reacting to what their peersthink, and quite often the conversationgrows more intense and collaborative.Using the Web, I will then ask students,either alone or in small groups, to explorelinks and compile evidence for comparativediscussion: what about that review in theLA Times? Who remembers those portraitsof Walt Whitman? Did anyone find a mapof Wounded Knee?

One major recurring motif in Americanwriting is the inscription of reality, theimaginative recasting of what Emerson, in“The American Scholar,” called “the com-mon . . . the familiar, the low.” To compre-hend the figural drift of Melville,Dickinson, or Faulkner, it’s valuable to seethe literal content of their times and places.For me, the Web creates a series of pathsinto that history, the better to grasp whymany years later a text reads as literature.Perhaps the author has made a significantchange or omission, a slight rearranging ofthe past for effect. Or perhaps we need todrop our contemporary blinders and learnto gloss a word or phrase as the author did.The Web provides these avenues of annota-tion, not fixed in marginalia but shiftingand evolving with each reader’s needs. Ofcourse, it’s also easier to search electroniclinks than paper offprints and clippings, letalone copy and circulate them. I used tomake a “green” argument for the Web,claiming it saved us tons of paper–until Ifound my students were laser-printingassignments, at exorbitant cost.

Over the years, I’ve found that it’s easier tobuild Web sites than to induce students touse them. They have many excuses: noworkstations available, the network wasdown, can’t remember how to log on, andthat old reliable, you never . . . said . . .this . . . was . . . required. So I began torequire Web use: every paper must have

both Web and library citations; review thesefive links and write a 500-word evaluationof them; test the online concordance ofMoby-Dick by searching for words describ-ing paternity and maternity. In time, thesullen fear of learning new skills faded,especially after English majors began topick up postcollegiate jobs as Web masters.

One spring I ran an entire American Studiesseminar on “Race and Region” throughWeb-based research and writing. We met onTuesdays to discuss the readings; on Wednesdays the students surfed madly, try-ing to solve a set of research problems: tracethe route of Frederick Douglass’s northernjourney; locate images of the SonoranDesert; who sponsored the Dawes GeneralAllotment Act? On Thursdays, we dis-cussed these findings and their implica-tions. Far from regarding the problems astrivia, students saw them as multiple con-texts that framed the primary readings.They also reported to me that their parentswere logging onto the course from far awayand reading over our shoulders.

Perhaps the greatest challenge I had wascreating a Web-based course called“American Literature before 1825.” Here,The Heath Anthology of American Literature,second edition, came to my rescue. I likedits inclusion of Native, Spanish, and Frenchauthors, and its careful mix of historicaldocuments with literary period pieces.Uncertain how much ancillary material Icould locate on the Web, I was astonishedwhen the total represented more than 80percent of the works assigned. The nexttime I repeat the course, I plan to take fulladvantage of the stunning Web site createdto support the latest Heath Anthology. Itremains the single most impressive book-Web site I have seen, thanks to the inspiredwork of editor Paul Lauter and Web masterRandy Bass. The Web address ishttp://www.hmco.com/college/english/heath/index.html.

My latest venture turns from teaching stu-dents to teaching teachers. For the next twosummers I will conduct a seminar forPrinceton graduate students in English andhistory on “Teaching with Technology.” I am working with two colleagues, from faculty and library, and we are taking onstudents with a wide range of technicalskills. Our ultimate goal is to have thembuild Web sites for their fall courses. Wealso expect to advance their dissertationresearch, by teaching them about onlineresources and how to use software as powerful organizing and writing tools. Our aim is to develop productive scholarswho are also versatile teachers, well prepared to meet the next generation of college students. ■

William Howarth, Professor of English atPrinceton, teaches courses in American litera-ture, environmental history, and media studies.He is author of many publications, includingThe Book of Concord, Thoreau in theMountains, and The John McPhee Reader.

Will Howarth’s article also appears online onThe Heath Anthology Web site. Visit the site and send us your comments about using theWeb in your classroom.

For me, the Web works best as a supplement toclasses, which studentsmay consult before or afterour discussions, especiallywhen preparing to write.

Now they are reading andreacting to what their peersthink, and quite often theconversation grows moreintense and collaborative.

It remains the single mostimpressive book-Web site I have seen.

For more information, consult the College Division at Houghton Mifflin’s home page: www.hmco.com.

Houghton Mifflin Company • College Division • 222 Berkeley Street • Boston, MA • 021164

Title: Report Concerning the Dreadful Caseof Enoch Threats

Author: Zac ShowersSchool: University of AlabamaInstructor: Tony Brusate

Essay AssignmentRewrite a Poe story from another point ofview with the goal of creating a tale that isas suspenseful, dramatic, and effective asthe original. Feel free to use the same“tricks” Poe employs to make his storieswork.

Report Concerning the DreadfulCase of Enoch Threats

Mr. Dwayne HansbyChief of PoliceNew Bedford, Connecticut

Dear Sir:

In truth, I never once thought him mad untilthe horrible deed was uncovered. Yes, Iknew he was dreadfully nervous, but mad?Certainly not—any man who said suchwould have been scoffed at by all. In faith, Ithought he was no more mad than hisneighbors, or the old man that had takenhim in. I never actually knew the chap until Iwas called upon to arrest him. As for thereasons behind his crime, only our Lordknows all, and I must have faith that Hewill be a fair judge.

The victim’s name was Enoch Threats, car-penter by trade and known for little otherthan a propensity towards the bottle. Notthat he drank to excess—far from it—but I

have found that in such a community asours merely an inclination towards the spir-its is enough to brand one for life. I myselfhad known the chap since I was a child, andduring his middle ages nothing extraordi-nary surfaced, at least nothing my smallmind could notice at the time. His most dis-tinguishing mark was the cataract coveringhis left eye, a defect that I must say was a bitunsettling, even to the stoutest of hearts. Hepossessed the eye of a vulture, a malformedorb that caused the Gypsies among us tomake strange hand-signals, and compelledold women to whisper and wonder about itover fences and market-tables. As a child Idid fear the man and his strange eye, and Iand my comrades never approached hishome even in the broadest of daylight forfear he might hex us. After I had grown Iknow I felt a great pity for the poor oldman, because his infirmity was certainly nofault of his own, and it did little to endearhim to anyone. In actuality, the eye musthave grown more ugly and severe overtime—such is the way of cataracts—but Imust admit I did not notice a significantchange until the fateful night it was foreverbranded on my soul.

This, of course, is the strangest aspect of thiscase, but no one in all of New Bedford couldrecall whether or not Mr. Threats had everbeen married, or if he had children or anyother family to speak of. Each of his neigh-bors, and in this list I must include myself,had merely assumed he was a widower, liv-ing alone either out of habit or necessity.However, the assumption that he wouldalways live alone must be amended, for hedid agree to take his future murderer intohis home for whatever reason. The additionof the man we came to know as Henry—Idoubt anyone will ever know his truename—came as a surprise to everyone con-cerned.

Henry appeared on the streets of NewBedford shortly after I became an officer,nearly two years past. He was, from allaccounts, a shiftless, uneasy sort of fellow,skilled in nothing but day labor. His familywas and is unknown, as is his place of ori-gin, though some say he came from as faraway as Georgia, and his later exploits cer-tainly point to beginnings in such a heathenplace. He was no vagrant, however; I neveronce saw him beg or harass anyone, nor didI hear him curse or talk above his station.He was nothing but an ordinary fellow, thatis, with the possible exception of his affinitytowards Mr. Threats.

Henry did everything with strange sudden-ness; one day he was assisting the black-smith in town by blowing the bellows, andthe next he seemed to have found his placein society, that being by the side of Mr.Threats. Certainly there was whispering;some believed him to be a long-lost relativeof the old man’s, while others of less reputespoke of blacker sins, things few men like toaddress and which I will certainly notdescribe here for the sake of good manners.It was apparent to us that the eye of Mr.Threats at first seemed to give his guest littlegrief, though constant contact with such anuneasy visage is certainly one of the con-tributing factors to his madness. Henrybehaved, as all madmen do in the begin-ning, with the utmost humility and courtesy.Though I admit to have suspected him as astranger, I did grow fond of the man inpassing, though we were never acquainteduntil the fateful night.

I have often wondered what drives sensiblemen to madness. After the deed was done,Henry accused the eye of his former bene-factor, raving and blathering over its powerand the chilling evil of the old man’s glance.In truth, this reason sounds as good as any,

1997 Heath Anthology Student Essay Contest Winners

The editorial board of The Heath Anthology of AmericanLiterature and its panel of judges are pleased to announce

the winners of the 1997 Student Essay Contest.

The winning essays, reprinted here, demonstrate excellent stu-dent writing and creative thinking. These essays, and theassignments that prompted them, demonstrate how works fromthe traditional and expanded canons inform each other and

shape our understanding today of the literatures and peoples ofAmerica. We thank all of the students who entered essays inthis seventh annual contest and all of the instructors who sharedtheir assignments with us. Instructors are free to duplicate theseessays and assignments for classroom use without requestedpermission.

FIRST-PLACE ESSAY

For more information, consult the College Division at Houghton Mifflin’s home page: www.hmco.com. 5

for no other motive for the vicious crime canbe uncovered. The old man had spared nokindness in the care of his houseguest, andthe house was not ransacked for valuables.Henry himself did not even flee the scene ofthe crime, even when confronted with threeofficers, including myself. I seriously doubtwe would have even suspected him had notthe hand of God intervened on the side ofjustice.

It was the schoolmistress who came runningto my door at half-past three screamingmurder. The woman is well known for exag-geration—she has seen the Devil in herdrawing-room on three separate occasions—and for this reason I and my fellow officersconsidered the visit to the Threats homemerely a formality. Henry, as usual, wasmost cordial in his reception, and in all oursearches he was smiling and courteous.However I did notice his overly pale com-plexion, and my companions were at uneaseover his eyes, which darted this way andthat and refused to light on any person orsubject. Though I do not expect you tobelieve me, I must admit that for a briefmoment I believe I saw Henry’s own eyecrust over and stare with the same terriblemethod at once peculiar to the old man.Nevertheless, his story about the old man’sabsence seemed credible, and we were but amoment from releasing him back to his bedwhen his mind, for no apparent reason atall, decided to become at once mostunhinged. He suddenly began to rave anddrool in a most unseemly manner, and wewere at once compelled to produce ourclubs in case of violence. Though I amloathe to admit it, even this display did notcause me to discredit his previous story, andI was still in the dark up to the momentwhen he began tearing up the floorboardsshrieking, “Here! Here! I admit the deed! Itis the beating of his hideous heart!”

With this revelation I was made privy to Mr.Threats’ true location. Never before or sincehave I seen a man dismembered in such ahellish and ungodly manner. His body washewn into several bloodless pieces, and allthat confirmed his identity was the afflictedeye, staring like a restless zombie into nothing.

The eye, coupled with what it had wrought,was enough for me to question all I hadknown, and stare at madness for the firsttime. After such a traumatic experience, Mr.Hansby, you can be assured I am able to donothing but reflect on the wickedness ofmen. The eye now and forever steadfastly

refuses to give me any solace from its gaze. Isee it in the faces of strangers on the street,sometimes even in the sweet faces of mychildren, and there are times when I canalmost feel the film creeping over my ownvision. Is this a sign of madness? I musthope not, and it is necessary for me to blamethe trauma of police work, or the eerieworkings of evil on my soul, lest I becomeas truly mad as Henry. My dreams are stillhaunted with the heinous act, and I know Imust atone for something lest the eye andHenry’s barbarism plague me for the rest ofmy days. Therefore, I am submitting thisaccount to you along with my resignation.

Sincerely,

John Wimberly

Title: One’s-Self The Modern ManAuthor: Jessie PowellSchool: College of Mount St. JosephInstructor: Elizabeth Bookser Barkley

Essay AssignmentDrawing upon your knowledge of WaltWhitman’s poetic techniques, form, andsubject matter and the culture of the mid-nineteenth century, argue that he can justifi-ably be called “the father of modernAmerican poetry.”

One’s-Self The Modern Man

Walt Whitman’s poem “One’s-Self I Sing” is one of the best reasons that he has beencalled the father of modern poetry. Hisentire poetic style differs from that of hiscontemporaries and predecessors in theareas of verse forms, rhythms, word choice,and even subject matter.

“One’s-Self I Sing” is a short poem. It’s onlyeight lines long. Yet, those eight lines con-tain some of the strongest ideas in modernpoetry. The hyphen in the title creates apowerful word: “One’s-Self.” Whitman’spoetry is filled with such unusual punctua-tion, which often serves to heighten thereader’s awareness and to introduce somefundamental image. In this case, the imageis of a self-contained person, “One’s-Self.” It is an image that grows throughout thepoem.

His irregular punctuation also serves tomake his poetry flow. The entire secondstanza is one sentence, separated by com-mas. Another poet in the mid-nineteenthcentury might have separated the stanzainto four sentences, which would haveruined the poem’s flow and disconnected itsideas.

Whitman’s poetry doesn’t follow a strictmeter. Instead, it is written in free verse withlines of poetry so long that they often spillinto two or three lines of text. Even the short“One’s-Self I Sing” contains this technique.Later poets have imitated this style, but hiscontemporaries tended to have meteredpoetry in which a line of text correspondedneatly to a line of poetry.

The periodic sentence is also an importantpart of Whitman’s poetry. It is another tech-nique that makes him different from his con-temporaries. The last stanza of “One’s-Self ISing” is a single sentence. The subjectappears at the end of this sentence. “TheModern Man I sing” (Selections 2788 8). Thelast line of the poem is also the subject of thethird stanza.

The words that Whitman uses would nothave been considered by other mid-nine-teenth century poets to be properly poeticwords. Even when they are not words of hisown creation, they tend to be unique andunexpected. For example, he comfortablyuses the word “physiognomy” (Selections2788 4) in “One’s-Self I Sing.” He also usesinverted word order to keep the reader’sattention. Instead of saying “complete form”in “One’s-Self I Sing,” Whitman says, “Formcomplete” (Selections 2788 4).

To be sure, subject matter is the thing thatmost makes Walt Whitman the father ofmodern poetry. “One’s-Self I Sing” presentsin its eight lines some of his most radicalpoetic ideas. One of the most importantthings that he conveys in this poem is hisextraordinary ordinarity. He is the bard ofAmerica because he makes himself intoAmerica. He writes about men, women,slaves, masters, and the very land they livein (Selections 2710).

In the first stanza of “One’s-Self I Sing,”Whitman introduces the idea of one personbeing all people, an idea which gives aframework to the poem. “One’s- Self I sing,a simple separate person, /Yet utter theword Democratic, the word En-Masse”

(continued on page 11)

SECOND-PLACE ESSAY

Houghton Mifflin Company • College Division • 222 Berkeley Street • Boston, MA • 021166

Teaching with theHeath Anthology inKoreaby Kun Jong Lee

I was probably the first teacher to use TheHeath Anthology of American Literature inKorea. When Paul Lauter visited Korea in1993, he was surprised to find somebodyusing the Heath there. I have used the Heathat Korea University for five years. I chosethe anthology as soon as I returned from theStates and got a teaching job at my almamater. The anthology was an ideal one forme to use in an American literature course,since I am, after all, a Korean by nationality,an African-Americanist by training, and amulticulturalist by choice.

But at the beginning of my undergraduatecourse, I met my students’ initial resistanceto my rationale of using the Heath. My stu-dents asked why I chose the particularanthology. I told them that I preferred it toother anthologies of American literaturebecause it best represented the diversity ofAmerican literature in terms of gender, race,and color. Far from being convinced of themerits of the anthology, they seemed to sus-pect that this guy fresh from the States wastrying to indoctrinate them with Americanconcepts and ideologies in Korea. In a sensethey were right: I was trying to teachAmerican literature to Korean students as ifI had been in an American classroom. Mymistake was slowly revealed to me: Iplanned to teach Korean students the signif-icance of multiculturalism in American liter-ature without considering the cultural dif-ference between Korea and the States! Afterall, we do not find big problems in our liter-ary canon; neither do race and color consti-

tute controversial concepts in our culturaland literary discourse.

My first challenge in using the Heath inKorea was, then, how to make multiculturalAmerican texts in the anthology meaningfulto Korean students. I asked my students aseries of questions about Korean literatureand culture: why there are so few womenwriters in classical Korean literature; whythose from a specific region of Korea areusually portrayed as servants, gangsters,swindlers, and tricksters in Korean filmsand TV dramas; why the images of Chineseand Japanese are severely distorted; whylawbreakers and rapists are ‘black’Americans and law-enforcing MPs are‘white’ Americans in Korean fiction, films,and TV dramas featuring American soldiersstationed in Korea. During the ensuing ses-sion of discussion, my students found therelevance of the apparently American con-cerns with gender, ethnicity, race, color, andstereotyping to a proper understanding ofKorean literature and culture. Once their ini-tial resistance was gone, I had very interest-ing and fruitful discussions with them in mysurvey course of American literature up tothe Civil War.

My students show an unusual interest in thecolonial period. Their interest is understand-able partly because an American literaturecourse in Korea usually starts with theAmerican Renaissance writers or withWashington Irving at the earliest. My stu-dents are not so happy with the editorialpolicy of situating Native American oral literatures, collected and recorded in thenineteenth and twentieth centuries, at thebeginning of the anthology. They think theanthology has an expansionist intention inincorporating Columbus. They find thePocahontas motif in the episode of JohnOrtiz and conclude that the European fanta-sy has a long history. They recognize a par-allel between John Winthrop’s vision of the‘Citty upon a Hill’ in A Modell of ChristianCharity and Clinton’s conception of the roleof the States in his New World Order. Onestudent even hears a familiar ring in theIMF’s request to ‘Westernize’ Korea’s eco-nomic system in its master plan to help outKorea from the ‘Asian Economic Crisis:’ asthe conquistadores dichotomized the world,tried to ‘civilize’ the ‘barbarians,’ andimposed their rule on the ‘New World,’ hecomments cynically, so the IMF, controlledby American and European capitalist inter-ests, finds Asian economic systems outmod-ed and erroneous and tries to Westernize

Asian countries economically at whatevercost to the Asians. Indeed, my students areable to apply their critical thinking not onlyto foreign texts but also to their current con-text.

My experience in using the Heath suggestedto me the development of new courses thatwere inconceivable a few years ago inKorea. The English department of KoreaUniversity now offers courses such as‘Minority American Literatures’ and‘American Women Writers.’ I already feelthe need to divide the minority literaturescourse: my students want to find their rela-tives’ voices in American literature. I amconsidering teaching Korean-American liter-ature or Asian-American literature nextsemester. Thus the Heath Anthology hashelped my students to develop criticalthinking and me to develop new courses inAmerican literature.

Kun Jong Lee is Associate Professor of English atKorea University. His interests include African-American and Korean-American literature.

My first challenge in usingthe Heath in Korea was,then, how to make multi-cultural American texts inthe anthology meaningfulto Korean students.

The anthology was anideal one for me to usein an American litera-ture course, since I am,after all, a Korean bynationality, an African-Americanist by training,and a multiculturalistby choice.

For more information, consult the College Division at Houghton Mifflin’s home page: www.hmco.com. 7

The Memo, the Heath,and the Nortonby Paul Lauter

As many of you may know, Washington Postwriter Jonathan Yardley produced a columnon 16 February 1998 attacking the HeathAnthology. He used as the basis of his column a memo I had prepared for theHoughton Mifflin sales staff comparing thenew Heath and the new Norton anthologies.Yardley claimed that the memo had beensent to faculty and departments across thecountry, which was not true, of course. Hismain comment about the Heath was a famil-iar, and rather wearisome, complaint thatwe decide to include writers on the basis ofethnicity, race, gender, or other such mattersrather than because a writer is interesting orsignificant. I won’t bore you with the detailsof his column, which, in any case, you mayhave seen in the funny papers.

But because Yardley used what was a private sales memo to such perverse ends, I felt it would be desirable to provide read-ers of the Newsletter with something of theoriginal memo. When I looked at it, howev-er, I realized that only the bottom man onKenneth Starr’s staff would really find it ofinterest, so instead, I’ve prepared a brief article laying out what I see as some basicdifferences in approach of the Heath and the Norton anthologies.

But I cannot send out this article withoutapologizing to my friends and colleagues onthe Norton editorial board. Yardley usedexcerpts from the memo to suggest that theNorton Anthology had become a standard-bearer for tradition, in contrast to thenaughty radicalism of the Heath. That’shardly accurate: the editors of the Nortonhave, like almost all other anthology editors,responded in their own ways to the funda-mental changes in the American literarycanon that have reshaped our profession inthe last quarter century. To be sure, we haveour differences, and my memo did, indeed,highlight these, as seemed appropriate to itspurpose: helping busy sales people perceiveand accurately represent those differences.But while I think these differences are signif-icant, I want to be clear that my criticisms inno way are meant to paint our colleagues asretrograde or uninformed. That would beabsurd. What is at contest is not wisdom orknowledge about American literature butdiffering ideas about what makes sense

within the pages of an anthology and thus, Ithink, in the curriculum of courses in thediscipline. About such matters we can, Iexpect, agree to disagree.

One basic difference between the Heath andthe Norton has to do with much longerworks included in the main anthology andthe implications for coverage of that deci-sion about including whole novels. We felt,first, that students particularly dislikedworking with full novels in a large antholo-gy, that they would rather have such longerworks in separate volumes. Furthermore—and this was critical—it was clear to usthat the more one included novels, the moreone’s coverage of writers would be signifi-cantly reduced in scope. Finally, we found

that many students complained over the factthat the only novels available in the antholo-gies were those they had read, sometimesmore than once, in high school. For all thosereasons, we decided to take The Scarlet Letterout of volume 1 and Huckleberry Finn out ofvolume 2 and offer them in separate booksthat could be packaged with the mainanthology.

In addition, we chose to extend the possibili-ties of using whole novels or other texts in acourse by offering a number of volumes inthe Riverside series—like Moby-Dick,Walden, and The American—as alternativepossibilities to the Hawthorne and Twainworks. If this approach works well, it is pos-sible that Houghton Mifflin will extend theRiverside series to include works not nowavailable. Finally, we decided to add a num-ber of longer works, like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “May Day” (36 anthology pages) andRichard Wright’s “Bright and Morning Star”(25 anthology pages) that, while not novels,are quite complex enough to enable teachersto engage students in problems like narra-tive structure and development.

By contrast, the Norton editorial boardchose to include not only the two familiarworks, Huck and The Scarlet Letter, but also anumber of other novels. It is an interestingchoice, as are the novels they decided toselect, and I can imagine developing a goodargument for that decision. Yet, because onecannot push an anthology much beyond3,000 pages, it has some problematic conse-quences.

One of the most obvious—and this was amatter to which my memo gave some care-ful scrutiny—was what gets left out whenone devotes all those pages to novels. In thiscase, the omissions are significant. Amongcontemporary writers, those omitted fromthe new Norton are Tillie Olsen, NormanMailer, Rolando Hinojosa (who, amongother things, is among the best-known“American” writers in Latin America),Gloria Anzaldúa (whose Borderlands/LaFrontera is an increasingly influential text),Carolyn Forché (more and more seen asamong the most significant American poetof working-class origins and subjects),Helena Viramontes (whose story “TheCariboo Cafe” is a contemporary classic andvividly connected to the issues of immigra-tion today), Cynthia Ozick, Martin LutherKing, and Malcolm X.

Apart from these writers, I also pointed tothe omission (just to name writers I havetaught) of Hisaye Yamamoto, John EdgarWideman, Amy Tan, Gary Soto, WendyRose, Pedro Pietri, Ann Petry, Joyce CarolOates, Bharati Mukherjee, Etheridge Knight,Gish Jen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Pietro DiDonato, Robert Creeley, Lucille Clifton, JohnBarth, Rudolfo Anaya. And, from earlierperiods, Carlos Bulosan, Paul LaurenceDunbar, James Weldon Johnson, NellaLarsen, Charles Reznikoff, Louis Zukovsky,Alain Locke’s important essay “The NewNegro,” as well as Frances Ellen WatkinsHarper, Mary Antin, Abraham Cahan, EllenGlasgow, and Susan Glaspell.

Now I would not argue that all of thesewriters are essential to any good, upstand-ing American anthology. But my memo sug-gested that, cumulatively, such omissionsnecessarily distort a full picture of Americanculture. Particularly, I concluded, when itcame to certain areas, like the representationof Latino and Asian-American writers, orwriters of the 1930s, like Meridel LeSueur,Clifford Odets, and Mike Gold. That pointwas, needless to say, what touched off

(continued on page 8)

What is at contest is not wisdom or knowledgeabout American literature but differingideas about what makessense within the pages of an anthology

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Yardley. He also chastised us for omittingCheever, Vidal, and Vonnegut.

What seems to me really at issue here is notwhat conservatives like to call “affirmativeaction” selection but rather how one bestrepresents the differing yet overlapping cul-tural traditions that make up the mosaic ofAmerican literature. It has seemed to usfrom the beginning of the ReconstructingAmerican Literature project, from which theHeath Anthology grew, that such a goal couldbe accomplished only if we richly exempli-fied those traditions, in all their variety andcontradiction. For it is silly, after all, to main-tain that there are no significant differencesin cultural origin, intertextual references,ground-level experiences, among manyother matters, between, say, Cheever andHinojosa—that they are simply, solely, andunmarkedly “American writers,” one andall. The Norton editors understand thatquite well.

Our difference arises from history and fromdifferent editorial processes. When webegan the Reconstructing AmericanLiterature project some twenty years ago,we saw it as our goal, and our obligation, toprovide a fuller and, I think it is fair to say,more accurate and honest picture ofAmerican literary culture than had thereto-fore been offered. In pursuing those objec-tives, we were supported—and urged on—by literally hundreds of people, many ofwhom became contributing editors.Technically, the anthology is the “property”of Houghton Mifflin Company; mechanical-ly, it is the product of a group of editors, anda very much larger group of contributingeditors. But intellectually and, if I may put itthis way, morally, it is the expression of abroad community of literary scholars andstudents. In a certain rough but insistentway the Heath editors answer to that com-munity, and it is that sense of responsibilityto a community of ideas and of people thatleads to our basic decisions, like the one notto sacrifice a rich diversity in coverage forthe sake of including long works, like nov-els, which can easily be made available inseparate volumes.

My memo also pointed to a number of otherdifferences, some of which involve simplyquestions of taste and preference, but othersof which derive from the same fundamentaldecision about printing much longer works.Those involve the Heath’s inclusion of arange of seventeenth- and eighteenth-centu-ry poetry, Paula Bennett’s new selection of

the work of nineteenth-century womenpoets (most of which are otherwise unavail-able), and Cary Nelson’s “sheaf” of politicalpoetry from the modernist period. Othermatters I discussed had to do with why weuse ten plays, both longer ones likeMordecai Manuel Noah’s She Would Be aSoldier and David Henry Hwang’s M.Butterfly and shorter works like SusanGlaspell’s “Trifles” and Clifford Odets’sWaiting for Lefty.

But I am sure my readers have had enoughof comparisons and lists. So I will concludewith the text of my response to the Yardleycolumn. The International Herald-Tribuneprinted it in full, but the Washington Postchose to cut it to the point of utter dullness—apparently it was not sufficientlysalacious for today’s dailies. Here it is, inany case:

19 February 1998To the EditorWashington Post

Dear Sir or Madam:

I was gratified to find that the HeathAnthology of American Literature, now adecade old and in its third edition, still hasthe capacity to raise the hackles of a culturalheavy like Jonathan Yardley. But for all thepleasure Yardley’s column (Post, 16February 1998) gave me, I do think he owesme a cut of the proceeds. After all, half hisarticle consists of my words or ideas. Andwhile he suggests that we make scads ofmoney from the Heath, I’ll bet a c-note thathe pulls in more from a single column than I do from a year of editing the anthology.

In any case, though he did spell my nameright, I wish he had gotten the rest of thedetails straight. The anthology doesn’t cost$100 but under $40 for each of the 3,000-page volumes; that’s probably cheaper perpage than the Post. And my memo, fromwhich he quotes so freely, wasn’t written tocollege faculty or departments as he claims,but to the sales staff of Houghton MifflinCompany, which now publishes the Heath.

I could go on in this tedious factual vein,but I really do understand that noWashington reporter could resist an earth-shattering leak, like a memo revealing thatthe Heath doesn’t include John Cheever andGore Vidal. Gracious! Not only is that true,but I am forced to acknowledge that we alsoneglected William Gilmore Simms, JamesRussell Lowell, and even the author ofSwallow Barn.

Such silliness aside, I’d suggest that readersinterested in the richness of American litera-ture have a look at what the anthology actu-ally includes. Like readers in some fiftycountries around the world, they are likelyto find it of rather more interest than promo-tional memos or even, alas, J. Yardley.

Yours truly,

Paul LauterSmith Professor of LiteratureTrinity CollegeHartford, CT 06106USA

… apparently it was notsufficiently salacious fortoday’s dailies.

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Some TeachableIronies about theStieglitz Photo on theCover of The HeathAnthology, Volume 2by Peter B. Harris

During the first half of this century, AlfredStieglitz was America’s most vigorous andpersuasive champion of photography as anart form. He kept battering at the partitionbetween fine art and what, to many, seemedthe far too easily mastered practice of takingpictures. To this day, photography exhibitstend to be in the basement of museums, butbetter there than nowhere, and thanks in nosmall part to Stieglitz.

He also promoted, through his gallery andhis avant-garde circle in New York, manyartists associated with international andAmerican modernism in both painting andphotography, including Georgia O’Keeffe,who became his second wife. Stieglitz’slegacy also includes his brilliant pho-tographs, including The Steerage, on thecover of volume 2 of the new Heath. It washis favorite, so much so that he once wrote,“If all my photographs were lost, and I wererepresented only by The Steerage, that wouldbe quite all right.”

Why would a person of such daunting con-noisseurship be tempted to such hyperbolicpartiality? Why did one hastily composedphotograph of working-class people on thelower decks of an ocean liner seem to himthe redemptive epitome of his life’s work?An attempt to answer these questions deliv-ers us into the contraries at the heart of avery complex fellow. And also into thematictensions that run throughout Americanexperience and literature.

For Stieglitz, The Steerage encodes a class-Aepiphany. By 1907 Stieglitz, already enabledby a high-powered German education, hadmarried an heiress whose wealth made itunnecessary for him to do conventionalwork and, therefore, freed him to promotephotography and modern art. Sailing, as hesaid, at his wife’s insistence—on the fashion-able Kaiser Wilhelm II—he soon becomeheartily sick of the atmosphere in first class.What he hated, though, was not so muchthe wealth and privilege but the insufficient-ly knowing display of it—”the ‘nouveaux

riches.’” Altogether too many unsinkableMolly Browns.

On day three at sea, he went forward for awalk and found a place on the edge of thefirst-class deck that allowed him to lookacross at a lower class and also down intothe lowest class, steerage. He was thunder-struck by the convergence of significantform and content. The geometry of thescene, particularly the empty gangway thatwent over the heads of the people on thelowest deck, and the arrangement of thepeople, particularly the man in the straw hatand the mother with child, summed up, ashe said, “the feeling I had about life.”

The most immediate and pragmatic ques-tion that faced Stieglitz is one that has facedmany a writer in the Heath: “should I try toput down the seeming new visions that heldme—people, the common people . . . thefeeling of release that I was away from the

mob called the rich.” The answer was, ofcourse, “yes.” He ran to get his camera,returned, and since there wasn’t a whole lotto do in steerage, everybody was still therewhen he got back; nonetheless, it seemed amiracle to him that he was able to return intime to take what he, and many others, con-sidered to be the photograph of his life.

Whether it is or not is a moot question. ButThe Steerage does imply a great deal aboutStieglitz’s self-estrangement and his desireto heal, evade, or mediate it through art.There are ironies and binarisms aplentyhere. The view he discovered on his strolldelivered him into, and gave him a sense ofrelease from, some of the deepest tensions inhis life. The picture, because of its strongsense of formal design and the presence ofthe proletariat, brought high and low artinto momentary relationship. When he firstlooked at the scene, he thought ofRembrandt, another artist who sometimeschose common people as his subjects, even,on occasion, Jews. Like many a Jew ofGerman extraction at that time, Stieglitz was

uncomfortable with his ethnicity and evenidentified Jewishness as what was most vex-ing about him, “the key to my impossiblemakeup.” Yet there in the center of TheSteerage is a woman wearing a shawl,striped like a tallith, or Jewish prayer garb.It would have been highly unusual for aJewish woman of that day to wear tallith,yet perhaps the resemblance of her shawl tothe garb of an observant Jew may have con-tributed to his identifying the scene with hissense of real “life,” at least seen from above,at the remove of altitude, lens, religiousidentifications, and class. As Benita Eislerpoints out, Stieglitz, unlike his protégé PaulStrand, always photographed the poor froma distance rather than close-up. And like, forexample, Hamlin Garland’s protagonist in“Up the Coule,” Stieglitz, in The Steerage—figuratively, at least—returns to his origins,identifies them as somehow central to hisdeeper life, but also exploits them as materi-al for rejuvenating his art.

Certainly one of the central reasons for thecontinuing appeal of this photograph is thatit iconizes the great drama of emigration toAmerica. It’s hard not to be touched by thegrave bearing and the gritty dignity of peo-ple we suppose are about to land on EllisIsland. If invited to speculate, we, and ourstudents, might guess that the figures in TheSteerage are buoyed up by a sense ofpromise but weighed down by a sense ofuncertainty about the future and, perhaps,with a sense of grief over abandoning theirculture and their homelands. But if we didso guess, we might be right in general butwrong in this particular case.

Perhaps the most instructive irony of allconnected to this photograph is one thatimplicates not just Stieglitz but us. It con-cerns the direction of the ship. It’s headedeast, back to Europe! The people in this pho-tograph are part of the tens of thousands ofreemigrants. By some accounts as many as17 percent of immigrants returned home.While the great majority of Jews, Irish,Germans, and Scandinavians who came tothe United States stayed, other ethnicgroups were less willing to call it home.Among men, while only 4.3 percent and 8.9percent of Jews and Irish, respectively,returned to their homelands, 45.6 percent ofItalians, 51.9 percent of Spanish, and 65 per-cent of Russians took the same trip thatStieglitz captures so memorably.In the era of cultural studies, The Steeragemay help our students see that photogra-

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... photography, no lessthan literature, is a medium that inviteseveryone’s projectionsand constructions.

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phy, no less than literature, is a medium thatinvites everyone’s projections and construc-tions. When we know that the chic KaiserWilhelm II was leaving the Promised Land,Stieglitz’s photograph changes. Suddenly,we look at the scene and wonder if the trav-elers had become discouraged and home-sick in the face of American loneliness, or ifthey had been defeated, or just disgusted atthe excesses and inequities of capitalism.

And as for Stieglitz himself, students mightbe instructed to know that he may haveidentified so deeply with this scene in partbecause, as a child, he had also been uproot-ed to make this reemigrant trip, albeit underdifferent circumstances. His pro-Germanfamily, having made their fortune inAmerica, returned to Berlin so that youngAlfred could have a proper German educa-tion. In his later years, Stieglitz ran a gallerycalled The American Place designed specifi-cally to support American artists. But thisnationalism concealed the fact that, at somelevel, he always felt estranged or mid-Atlantic, neither German nor Jewish norentirely American. And nothing morepoignantly expressed those tensions thanthe picture he took looking down into class-es removed from him but, nonetheless,expressing his sense of the essence of life.

Peter B. Harris is Professor of English andDirector of Creative Writing at Colby College.He writes the Poetry Chronicle for The VirginiaQuarterly Review and is the author of a book ofpoems, Blue Hallelujahs.

The Heath Anthology of American Literature,Third EditionPaul Lauter (General Editor)

Vol. 1: (0-395-86822-X) Vol. 2: (0-395-86823-8)

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(Selections 2788 1-2). In the last line of thelast stanza, he states “The Modern Man Ising.” Each stanza of the poem expandsupon this “One’s-Self” until the vastly com-plete image of “Modern Man” is created. Infact, every human being is a single part ofthis entity.

Further, he doesn’t confine himself to distantthoughts on God, a technique which waspopular in the poetry of his time. Especiallyin “One’s-Self I Sing,” he propels himselfinto Godhead, and challenges the Christianview of God. In the second stanza, Whitmanpoints out that “Not physiognomy alone norbrain alone is worthy for the Muse”(Selections 2788 4). First, he is exploring theconcept of a higher power in these lines,which he indicates with the words “worthyfor the Muse” (Selections 2788 4). He drawsPlato’s Forms into the God theme by capital-izing the word “Form” (Selections 2788 4).Plato believed that material objects weremerely imperfect representations of perfectnon-material objects, and that we all striveconstantly to equal these perfect Forms. InJudeo-Christian philosophy, God is consid-ered to be perfect, and humans to be merelyimperfect representations of God.

But Whitman isn’t placing God above man

with this poem. The “Form” he refers to isthe combination of body and brain thatmake up the human being. The word“Form” touches on his celebration of thehuman body (Selections 2710). Whitman ismaking the human Form into the ideal. Heis making man, and the poet especially, intoa God. This “Man-God” idea is now con-tained in that powerful word “One’s-Self.”

He also explains, in the second stanza, that“The Female equally with the Male I sing”(Selections 2788 5). This line contains twoimportant ideas. First, Whitman makes clearthat “One’s-Self” is not only a man; it is alsoa woman. Secondly, it shows howWhitman’s poetry is political (Selections2710). Feminism was an issue in the mid-nineteenth century, although it was onewhich the dominant Protestant culturewould liked to have swept under a philo-sophical rug. Whitman drags the issue outinto the open in his poetry, an act in whichother male poets of the time would not haveparticipated.

In the final stanza of the poem, he capital-izes the word Life. Now, the “Man-Woman-God” is more even than all of humanity, it isall of life. It is the ‘‘passion, pulse, andpower” (Selections 2788 6) of all livingthings. Whitman gives this “Man-God-Life”entity two names. The first is “One’s- Self,”

which is not only a part of the poem’s title,but is also the first word of the first line. Thesecond name is, appropriately, contained inthe poem’s last line; “The Modern Man Ising” (Selections 2788 8).

We are all that “Modern Man” (Selections2788 8), and Wait Whitman is our father.With poems like “One’s-Self I Sing,”Whitman shows his universality. His con-cept of the modern extends back to thebeginning of creation and forward until theend of time. He wrote to be read for all time,not just during his life. In doing so, he madehimself the father of modern poetry.

Selections from Walt Whitman and EmilyDickinson: Supplement to The Heath Anthologyof American Literature, ed. Lauter et al.Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Company, 1990.

T-AMLIT is Back!The Electronic Archives for Teaching the American LiteraturesRecognized as a Magellan 3-Star Site for Web Excellence

T-AMLIT is complemented by another resource, The Electronic Archives for Teaching the American Literatures, on the WorldWide Web. The Web site, housed at Georgetown University and developed by the Center for Electronic Projects in AmericanStudies, contains a wide range of materials and resources, including syllabi and course materials, the logs and notebooks from T-AMLIT, the complete run of The Heath Anthology Newsletters, as well as hundreds of pointers, indexes, and gateways to otherinternet resources on the literatures of the United States.

The WWW address (or URL) for the Electronic Archives:http://www.georgetown.edu/tamlit/

Contributions of syllabi, course materials, bibliographies, or general inquiries should be made to:Center for Electronic Projects in American Studiesc/o Randy Bass, DirectorEnglish DepartmentGeorgetown UniversityWashington, D.C. 20057

How toSubscribe to T-AMLIT

To subscribe to T-AMLIT, send a message to listproc@list.cren.netwith the message:subscribe T-AMLIT your name

Send inquiries to :tamlit@guvax.georgetown.edu

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