sollors and his team encouraged the assembled essayists to be inspired by events, artifacts, or figures outside their academic expertise.
BEYOND THE FRAMEWORK OF A BOOK shock—Should something exist?— to actually having a proposal.” In May of 2007—with both a A Radcliffe Exploratory Seminar in September concept and a contract in hand— 2012, led by Glenda Carpio, a Harvard professor Marcus and Sollors led a followof African and African American Studies and of up four-day seminar. By then, the English, may have occurred very recently, but it members of the editorial board has already helped shape a new book. A week afhad more than half the book’s ester the seminar, Carpio told Radcliffe officials that says in front of them. By NovemHarvard University Press had offered to publish A ber 2008, a completed manuNew Anthology of American Literature. It will emscript was ready for the printer. phasize “intersections” between black and nonThe Radcliffe seminars helped black writers; will cover ethnic and multicultural shape the book’s 219 essays, along writing, especially in the modern era; and—most with a few of its eccentric and radically—will take the idea of an anthology becontrarian editorial principles. yond “the framework of the book,” Carpio says, “a Among them: “Avoid the kitsch format no longer suited to the sensibilities of 21st of multiculturalism,” in Sollors’s century students.” The print book—coedited by words—that is, for instance, avoid Carpio, Jeffrey Ferguson of Amherst College, and having African Americans write Harvard’s Werner Sollors—will have a companion just about African American digital component that is accessible to subscribfigures. Instead, invite the writers ing students. of color to take adventurous side That digital version will most likely include trips: to write about Edith Wharclickable links to other texts; a “listen-to” feature ton, Theodore Dreiser, Tarzan, for hearing text read aloud; digital annotations and the Wizard of Oz. that take readers to original sources; access to the Another editorial principle: full version of any excerpted text; links to criticism avoid narrow channels of acand other contextual sources; links to related knowledged expertise. The anworks of art; and links to world literature, so that thology’s essayists were encourstudents get a sense of a text’s “transnational, aged to explore events, artifacts, hemispheric, or global” references, says Carpio. and figures that fascinated them but may have fallen outside the bounds of their previous scholarship. just over 200, jettisoning along the way “We have quite a few entries that have entries on Christopher Columbus, the this kind of freshness,” said Sollors— potato chip, blue jeans, and other explowriters exploring a “long-standing pasrations. In some cases, favored subjects sion” instead of an established field. were saved by conflation: Absalom, The seminars also firmed up another Absalom and Gone with the Wind—“two editorial principle: Hang each essay on southern novels dealing with the myth a date and on a figure or artifact—but of the South,” said Sollors, that “couldn’t don’t stop there. “Roam back and forth, be more different”—were provocatively, as seems appropriate,” said Sollors of invitingly, amazingly joined in Carolyn the plastic, inclusive, and eye-opening Porter’s essay “1936.” A first, surely. Yet essays the board encouraged. For Porter uncovers what makes them both instance, Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s essay glow, one like gold and one like radium: “1836, February 28,” on Richard Henry racism. She writes of the Faulkner novel, Dana Jr. does not just dwell on the “At the source of the American Dream author of Two Years Before the Mast. It itself lies slavery.” swings back and forth in time, touchSollors said he has “two sea chests” of ing along the way Robinson Crusoe, correspondence left over from the labor Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Jack of making such a big book. He may get London, Jack Kerouac, and Joan Didion, back to them someday, but meanwhile, the Californian who reversed Dana’s he remembers the Radcliffe seminars east-to-west pilgrimage. and what they helped deliver when the But consider what was left out of the project was new. anthology. Within a year of the first Radcliffe seminar, the editorial board had Corydon Ireland is a staff writer for to reduce about 400 candidate essays to the Harvard Gazette. Photograph by Joshi Radin
Winter 2013 r a d c l i f f e m a g azine
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