“Literature makes life much more worth living.”

Stephen Greenblatt, the current general editor of The Norton Anthology, and M. H. Abrams, the founding general editor, discuss the challenges facing the humanities curriculum and address the enduring question, Why study 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.

You have noted a turn away from the past among students and their teachers. Are there signs of a counter-trend back toward the basics?

Greenblatt: When I teach a course with my colleague Louis Menand that starts with Homer and goes up to Joyce, the pressure on enrollment is huge, because it turns out many students — without the compulsion of their teachers — feel that they really shouldn’t (should?) go through their undergraduate years without reading the great imaginative works of the past.

Abrams: One of the joys of teaching with the anthology is to watch the excitement grow as students, who may think the past dull and irrelevant, find how fresh and new and powerful are the kinds of writings that are hundreds of years old.

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For a prospective undergraduate reading this Q. and A., how would you answer the question, Why study literature?

Abrams: Ha — Why live? Life without literature is a life reduced to penury. It expands you in every way. It illuminates what you’re doing. It shows you possibilities you haven’t thought of. It enables you to live the lives of other people than yourself. It broadens you, it makes you more human. It makes life enjoyable. There’s no end to the response you can make to that question, but Stephen has a few things to add.

Greenblatt: Literature is the most astonishing technological means that humans have created, and now practiced for thousands of years, to capture experience. For me the thrill of literature involves entering into the life worlds of others. I’m from a particular, constricted place in time, and I suddenly am part of a huge world — other times, other places, other inner lives that I otherwise would have no access to.

Abrams: Yes. Literature makes life much more worth living.