Norton Anthology Of World Literature Pdf

[Eilene Balque]

Ledby Martin Puchner of Harvard University, the editors of the Fourth Edition (2018) are experienced classroom teachers as well as accomplished scholars. For help in selecting the best texts and translations and revising the editorial apparatus for the twenty-first-century classroom, the editors solicited the advice of more than 500 world literature instructors and expert counsel from a world-class team of regional specialists. The result is an anthology that a scholar can respect, that a teacher can assign with confidence, and that students can read and study with pleasure.

The Fourth Edition of the most trusted and widely used anthology of world literature retains and expands the most popular works from the last edition, while refreshing the anthology with new selections and new translations of major works. As always, the Norton provides hundreds of literary selections, helpful apparatus, beautiful illustrations, and a robust suite of digital resources.

The Norton Anthology of World Literature represents continuity as well as change. Like its predecessor, the anthology is a compact library of world literature, offering an astounding forty-three complete longer works, more than fifty prose works, over one hundred lyric poems, and twenty-three plays. More portable, more suitable for period courses, more pleasant to read, and more attuned to current teaching and research trends, The Norton Anthology of World Literature remains the most authoritative, comprehensive, and teachable anthology for the world literature survey.

When I was asked to edit the Norton Anthology of World Literature a decade ago, I was daunted by the task. Even with a team of co-editors and consultants, how could I possibly take responsibility for everything from Icelandic sagas to Chilean poetry, from the earliest writings to the most recent global authors? My head swam, thinking of the entire world. But what I would learn, from working on the Norton, was that world literature is always local.

The job started not with literary works but with questionnaires. I will never forget that moment when we sat around a conference table, staring at a large stack of surveys. The pile commanded respect, the force of numbers: hundreds of teachers against a handful of editors. We realized that our preferences didn't matter, that this was not about us imposing our tastes.

Our next lesson came when we learned where the anthology would be taught: world literature was a North American phenomenon. Even though the United States is famously provincial in that only about 2 percent of books sold are translations from abroad, it is the world leader in world literature courses. The most important reason is structural: the looseness of the American-style liberal arts education accommodates broad survey courses more easily than the more specialized systems dominant in the rest of the world.

The popularity of world literature in the South was so surprising to me -- and to pretty much everyone I have talked to -- that I decided to visit some of our adopters. When I asked them why their institutions were so invested in world literature, they explained that while many coastal elite universities had given up on Great Books courses during the canon wars, the more conservative southern colleges had held onto them. But gradually those institutions transformed what originally would have been Western literature courses into world literature courses. (This account dovetailed with another result from the surveys: a separate anthology of Western literature was losing adopters, and we have since decided to phase it out).

My most memorable trip led me to Alabama. In preparation, the local sales rep had sent me two items: the documentary film Muscle Shoals, set in the small northern Alabama town that boasted the hottest recording studio of the 1970s, and an issue of Garden & Gun, the glossy southern magazine with ads selling elegant rifles for the lady huntress.

Encountering the enthusiasm with which teachers and students tackled texts from far-flung places changed my view of what literature could do: it allowed students access to the foundational texts of foreign cultures, their cultural DNA. Far from being a mere substitute for travel, world literature offered a superior version of it.

While visiting southern colleges, I learned about a second effect of world literature courses: they were very good at fostering closer relations between local and international students. All segments of American higher education have become more international in the last two decades, with a large infusion of students from China, India, Saudi Arabia and South Korea (the four largest groups). In world literature courses, these students were experts, while local students grappling with foreign texts could find a deeper way of relating to their international colleagues. I even suspect that the internationalization of American higher education has contributed to changes in the canon, with the Analects of Confucius, the Mahabharata and the Arabian Nights (along with the Quran) now high on the list.

The interests of students in the South also dovetail with another feature of world literature: the importance of religious texts. Our current understanding of literature as fiction is recent. Anthologies of world literature, which cover 4,000 years, use a much wider definition -- namely, significant writing, including religious, philosophical and political texts. The Buddha and Socrates are as important as Virgil or Shakespeare.

Conversations with students and teachers in the South encouraged me to adopt a broader understanding of literature, one less focused on recent genres such as the novel and more attuned to foundational and religious texts. The change led me to write The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization, a recently published account of the shaping force of foundational texts.

My involvement with world literature courses also changed my view of the literary marketplace. Literature professionals in the United States tend to have degrees in English. Today, that is no longer enough. If we want to avoid nationalism and nativism, we should embrace world literature. Colleges in the South have been on the forefront of this shift to world literature because they know how important it is. We can learn from their dedication.

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She is so focused she often does not respond the first time we call her name. She looks like a Talmudic scholar poring over the tractates or a mathematician straining to divine the mystery buried deep in a differential calculus equation. She maintains the same body position for hours. She is my daughter, and she is playing Sims on her new iPad mini.

That she is playing a game means that she is not reading a book. Oh, she could read a book on her iPad, of course, but so far, she has chosen not to do so and we, her parents, have chosen not to push her.

My daughter, who just turned eleven, has not turned into the kind of reader that I hoped she would have. She is not the sort of kid to open a book and lounge on the couch for hours engrossed in fictional fantasy.

Of a Fire on the Moon offered me a great many rewards, and I recommend it to any reader interested in the NASA space program or the history of human exploration or the American zeitgeist during the 1960s and 70s.

Looking back on my reading list for 2012, I read twenty books. This is about average for me and, as I noted in a previous post, this is not an impressive number to some readers. However, considering the myriad demands of my life, I can live with it.

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Of course, one cannot teach the entire history of world literature in eleven weeks, yet that is, in a sense, what I am charged with each time I am assigned to teach the world literature course at our college.

Readers of this blog might well remember that I previously mentioned using the Norton Anthology of World Literature as our textbook. In that post, my concerns had more to do with the physically cumbersome nature of the book than the weightiness of the content between the covers. Now, having just completed another iteration of teaching GE4455, Literature, I have literary selections on my mind.

Despite the fact that my college is corporately owned and publically traded, and that we are in obeisance to a cabal of major shareholders, I have enjoyed near total autonomy over pedagogical decisions. Aside from the fact that the course competencies are delivered unto us from the corporate office in Pittsburgh, my colleagues and I have a say in the textbook we use, and we have enjoyed total control over how we deliver the course content.

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