This big brick of a book should be reviewed by an academic, for it is at the academy that it is aimed, being more a teaching tool than a gathering of pleasures for the common reader. Indeed, the editors in their preface helpfully point out that there is an accompanying manual of instruction, Teaching with "The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism": A Guide for instructors, by one M. Keith Booker (the shade of Nabokov hovers here, smiling wickedly). The anthology itself is longer than the Old and New Testaments, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Apocrypha put together, and contains as much arcana, dogma, and sublimities as do those great compendia. Also, it is very heavy: try reading this one in bed and you are likely to end up with a sprained wrist.
Despite its forbidding aspect - as always with Norton anthologies, the scholarly apparatus is exhaustive, and nigh impeccable - the book deserves attention. Every so often, the outsider should part the leaves and stick his head into the groves of academe to check how matters stand in there. Often it may seem that within those bosky redoubts there are so many botanists and tree surgeons busily at work that no place will be allowed for the mere nature lover.
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism has drawn on the labours of no fewer than six editors. Let us take a quick glance at them and their credentials. Vincent B. Leitch is a professor at the University of Oklahoma, and a "prominent historian of contemporary literary criticism and theory"; William E. Cain teaches at Wellesley College, and is a "scholar of American literature and American literary criticism"; Laurie Finke is "professor of women's and gender studies" at Kenyon College; Barbara Johnson is at Harvard, and "a leading figure in contemporary literary theory"; John McGowan teaches at the University of North Carolina, and is "a founding member of UNC's Program in Cultural studies"; Jeffrey J. Williams is an English professor at the University of Missouri, and has "published widely on theory, the novel, and the politics of the profession", meaning, one hopes, the academic profession.
This panel of six admits that in assembling the anthology "we have faced a number of challenges". Their original list of 250 writers had to be reduced to 148, for "even a very long book such as this one imposes limits". Nevertheless, the contents pages range widely, and the choice of contributors is catholic, if not eclectic. There are occasions of bathos, as when, for instance, the preface refers to a list of "lengthier selections" by "Longirius, John Dryden, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Adrienne Rich". Yes, indeed, all the great names are here. On the whole, however, the selection is astute, and even from the thickets of such contemporary disciplines - if that is the word - as "cultural studies", "new historicism", and "feminism and queer theory", it is the less crazed practitioners who have been chosen.
We are told that "the standard works of Western theory and criticism from the ancient Greeks to the present are represented, as are texts from 'forgotten' figures such as Moses Maimonides, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Frantz Fanon" (forgotten by whom, one wonders?). However, the emphasis is heavily on "modern and contemporary theory": 93 out of the 148 selections are from our own time. Although they have "privileged standard works and contemporary classics of theory", the editors have also "sought to resurrect forgotten texts and to discover overlooked gems". As a result, they say, with a Kinbotean twinkle, "We believe you will be pleasantly surprised."
Well, we are. There are marvellous things here, both old and new. It is good to have readily available in a single volume such items as the passage on the art of writing from Plato's Phaedrus on which Derrida has commented so brilliantly; Roland Barthes's infamous 'The Death of the Author' as well as his slyly playful essay on 'Soap-powders and Detergents'; Louis Althusser's letter to AndrΘ Daspre on art and ideology; the extract from Gorgias of Leontini's Encomium of Helen - certainly a "forgotten gem" for this reader - and Paul de Man's still challenging manifesto of deconstruction theory, 'Semiology and Rhetoric'.
While the headnotes on each of the contributors, which are really mini-essays, are invaluable, the footnotes can often seem risibly simple-minded - at random: "Friedrich Nietzsche - German philosopher (1844-1900; see above)". The introduction, obviously the product of divers hands, is a miracle of conciseness and common sense. Even here, though, there is the odd lapse: for instance, all is restraint and good manners until we get to the section on 'Feminism and Queer Theory', where suddenly the language turns nasty, and we have to duck such squirts of venom as the reference to "the confining and sickening backdrop of forbidding male literary authority". Male literary authority is no doubt a Bad Thing, but who is it we are to understand is sickened by it?
The editors are acutely - indeed, painfully - aware of the open schism, or "fault line", as they demurely call it, between "traditional literary critics" and "contemporary theorists". Theory today, they write, entails scepticism toward systems, institutions, and norms; a readiness to take critical stands and to engage in resistance; an interest in blind spots, contradictions, and distortions (often discovered to be ineradicable); and a habit of linking local and personal practices to the larger economic, political, historical, and ethical forces of culture.
They remark that such theory, or "cultural critique", to an earlier generation "looks like advocacy rather than a disinterested, objective inquiry into poetics and the history of literature". Quite. The editors compare this dispute to that between the ancients and the moderns in the Renaissance. This is to imply that we are in the midst of a renaissance now, whereas many - Harold Bloom, for one - consider that on the contrary we are entering, if we are not already in, a new Dark Ages, although our Dark Age will be flooded with intolerable light.
The question remains the old one: which comes first, the theory or the text? There have been critics, such as Samuel Johnson, for whom the literary work is free-standing, autonomous, and in need only of a sympathetic reader, not an explicator; Coleridge, on the other hand, was perhaps the first great theorist of the modern age, and his writings on the inner workings of literature are as valuable today as when they first appeared. The sceptics are to be found not only among our predecessors: Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels in their 1982 essay 'Against Theory', included here, threw down a gauntlet to the new academic establishment of deconstructionists and feminists and now historicists etc, which still lies at their feet, glinting in the light.
The trouble with theory is that it tends to elevate, or reduce, everything to the same level of value. To many contemporary theorists, television advertisements, let us say, are not only as rewarding a subject of detailed study as the plays of Shakespeare or the poetry of Dante, but are also equally significant as cultural artefacts. Surely this is not right. One would not wish to deprive the academy of its working materials; you may write PhDs on the oeuvre of Ian Fleming, or dissertations on the texts on the sides of cornflakes packets, but please, let us maintain a sense of proportion, and a crumb of humility.
John Banville is Associate Literary Editor and Chief Critic of The Irish Times