A Tribute to Jack Stillinger, by Deidre Lynch

Apr 16

Thank you to Professor Deidre Lynch (Harvard University) for writing the following tribute to Professor Jack Stillinger, who passed away on April 4, 2020. Our thoughts are with his family at this difficult time.

A Tribute to Jack Stillinger

By: Deidre Lynch

‘Unlike some of the others who have recently shared their memories of Jack Stillinger and their sorrow over his passing, I was never formally Jack’s student. Between 2004 and 2012, however, while I was an associate professor, first at Indiana University, and then at the University of Toronto, I worked with Jack revising and re-revising the Romantic period volume (Volume D) of the eighth and ninth editions of the Norton Anthology of English Literature. The education I received as part of that process has stayed with me ever since.

Over those years, I was lucky enough to be on the receiving end of private tutorials in textual criticism and editorial theory from one of the giants of that field. But Jack always insisted that the theoretical questions about textual instability and multiple authorship he raised in his brilliant scholarship had practical consequences for the classroom. That there are more than eighteen versions of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” does raise underacknowledged, fascinating questions about the ontological identity of the literary work and its mode of existence—but it also, Jack reminded us, raised practical questions: which one of those versions to reprint, when we’re only allowed one? And how do we make the choice? This was characteristic: Jack gave a lot of thought to teaching. The result for me was that those long summers of footnote-writing and rewriting also provided me with an invaluable education in how to engage and care for undergraduate readers.

Preparing to write this reminiscence, I contacted Julia Reidhead, now the President of W. W. Norton, and the in-house editor for four editions of the NAEL. She wrote to me about first meeting Jack in the mid- 1980s, when she had just finished being an undergraduate herself, on an occasion when (as she put it), “I was dazzled by the dozen literature scholars seated at the front of the room in Masterpiece Theatre-style leather wing chairs. The setting was the Norton college sales conference; the occasion was the introduction of the “second-generation” editors of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. As founding General Editor M. H. Abrams’s new co-editor of the Romantic Period, Jack was stepping into the prominent and not uncomplicated editorial role he would occupy for the next 25 years. What I recall of that long-ago theatrical event was Jack’s modesty and wry humor.”

That sense of humour, Julia noted, helped Jack rise to the challenges of a role he sometimes described with witty self-deprecation as that of “world’s oldest junior editor.” In fact, Jack was very supportive of me as one of the anthology’s third-generation editors—also an often-uncomfortable role—and of my vision of a Norton that, for instance, dedicated more pages to women poets and which acknowledged that the Gothic novel was part of Romanticism. More than once, he went to bat for me. At the same time, however, he could also be very funny about the consequences of all that canon-expansion and the augmentation of the Norton’s already-not-unsizeable girth.

Jack found Romantic poets and poems beautiful and awe-inspiring, but he also sometimes found them funny. (See, for instance, the affectionate anecdote about Coleridge’s time as “one of the most inept cavalrymen in the long history of the British army,” which has remained in the headnote in the Norton from one edition to another.) Jack’s identification with Keats, movingly charted in his article “Keats and Me,” was in part founded on the two men’s equally keen appreciation of the comic (though Keats’s “clear-headed” ethical thinking about our mortality was also important). Norton Anthologies are famously printed on “Bible paper,” which can make it seem as though the editors expect the books’ purchasers to read with the kind of reverence they might bring to a church service. Jack helped me see that it was also okay to make undergraduates laugh, even (or especially) when guiding them through their assigned reading. I owe him for that, for his faith in me, and much more besides.’