Fifty years ago this fall, undergraduates were assigned
their first Norton Anthology, often the only required text for a college
freshman’s survey of English literature.
The Norton Anthology plays a crucial role in a humanities
curriculum that is said to be under great pressure. Have you noticed the
effects of this pressure?
Greenblatt: Of course we have noticed. The issue is not
so much the anthology, but rather the fate of the whole enterprise of
studying what Matthew Arnold called the best which has been thought and
said in the world. For generations that enterprise occupied a key place
in college and university education everywhere, but there are signs that
it is in trouble. Humanities departments are fretting about a decline
in majors, and those students who do major in literature, art,
philosophy and history often clamor only for contemporary topics.
Has the Norton Anthology then lost its relevance?
Greenblatt: Not at all. The Norton Anthology was based
on the idea that it actually matters to plunge into a comic masterpiece
written in the 1300s or to weep at a tragedy performed in the 1700s.
What would it mean for a culture to give up on its past? It is vitally
important to remind people that the humanities carry the experience, the
life-forms of those who came before us, into the present and into the
future. Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and
we can speak back to them. Besides — as many studies have shown —
cultural knowledge turns out to be good for your career.
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