Essay anthologies designed specifically for use in composition classes come and go. It seems that as soon as one anthology is laid to rest, another takes its place, a done of several hundred past anthologies. Predictably, its publisher and editors herald it as better, more contemporary in its selections, and more professional in its apparatus. Furthermore, these new anthologies seem to grow larger each year, perhaps trying to overcome distant criticism through sheer bulk. They grow bold in unsupported and unrealized claims that promise to lift students to new levels of excellence and literacy. Most of these texts cannot be distinguished from one another; even their titles remain fuzzy, for they all share the buzz words that have come to make most readers the notorious pretenders they are—”guides,” “reading critically,” “models,” “thinking,” “strategies for reading,” “reading in order to write,” “readings for college students,” and the like. Nothing, it seems, can stop the interminable production of the composition reader.

But the prose anthology is here to stay, remaining unaffected except in superficial ways by reading and writing research. Kathleen Welch lamented recently in CCC (Oct. 1987) that publishers have not kept up with the emergence of knowledge in our field: “Of the hundreds of pounds of freshman writing books produced each year, few are constructed with any overt indication that composition theory has ever existed” (269). The prose anthology still sells more copies than either rhetorics or handbooks, even though reader-response theory, discourse theory, text linguistics, and studies in deconstruction and cognition (and, obviously, composing process research) have all but been ignored in these texts.

And, of course, no self-respecting composition instructor is ever going to denounce the value of reading in the composition classroom. The real issues, however, are how these readers are used in the classroom and how they affect the actual writing done there. Paul A. Escholz, probably the foremost advocate of a prose model approach to composition, readily admits the drawbacks of using an anthology. Prose models, if seen as the primary text in the class, may well be inappropriate in terms of length, writing technique, and style; they may overwhelm and intimidate students and take away writing time in class; they may not illuminate real writing problems that need to be solved; they may place unwarranted emphasis on form and not on content, on product instead of the composing process; and they may allow composition faculty to teach writing without any incentive to explore new pedagogical directions.

Despite the problems with readers, however, one recently published anthology deserves considerable and focused attention, if only because it affords students and faculty entry into an important, even critical, field previously ignored not only by departments of English but by most academic disciplines. Carol J. Verburg’s Ourselves Among Others: Cross-Cultural Readings for Writers does not make any significant inroads into application of reading and writing research per se. In fact, it might even suffer, or at least have the potential to suffer, from any of the pedagogical flaws of past readers: its voluminous material may well “overwhelm” and “indicate,” not to mention the effects of the material’s complexity and breadth. Surely, the essays included in the anthology will demand much class time for explication, discussion, and instructor leadership. The very nature of the essays will necessarily draw attention to product and away from the composing process. On the other hand, if a composition course, preferably an advanced one, is the most appropriate course within academe for such a text, then so be it. If instructors can make the anthology work half as well as the promise it holds, then the rewards will outweigh all that is lost. We may well have to turn the tables on ourselves: instead of demanding that texts extend our pedagogical considerations, we may now have to find ways that we can work with the text because the text in this instance is that important.

The challenge that Verburg’s reader posits for us seems almost as exhaustive but exciting as the original task of putting together such a project must have seemed for Verburg. The anthology includes sixty-five superbly selected readings, many of them translations. These sample writings represent thirty-seven different cultures and coun­tries from all continents except Antarctica. About three-quarters of the selections are nonfiction prose—essays, reportage, interviews, autobiographies, and sociological-political studies. About one-quarter are short stories that reveal, according to Verburg, “much about the internal qualities of [the authors’] cultures to ‘outsiders”’ (x).

The work represents the genre of nonfiction prose as no other anthology ever has, not to mention the possibilities of the more precise global understanding that the text generates. Ourselves Among Others smashes through Euro-based lines of chauvinistic literary tradition and racially-fixed definition; it elevates the genre to the universal level it deserves by showing that this kind of writing is truly the way we learn and communi­cate in the world—regardless of race or nationality. Far from the rather culture-bound perspectives of the Baker/Goodman and Swift/Orwell kinds of essays found in previous composition anthologies, these selections demand penetrating vision and sophisticated cultural understanding while demonstrating explicit connection to all other disciplines both inside and outside the liberal arts. in this way, the sample writings become functional as well as artistic; political as well as academic; public as well as private. Never before have we had more of an opportunity to exhibit for our students the universal expression of our genre as it affects nations and individual lives.

The variety, richness, and diversity of the prose throughout the text surprises. This anthology represents some of the world’s most outstanding contemporary writers—ones who more times than not have been ignored in American literary circles and classrooms:

The Foreword by Sol Gittleman convinces us (although we don’t really have to be convinced) of the larger picture that this text delivers of the importance of students learning to live in a global village: ‘To assure that our grandchildren survive to have their own grandchildren, we must begin thinking about how the peoples of the world deal with their problems, think about themselves, and share a mutual concern for survival. To give us all a chance, we must learn to deal with each other as fellow inhabitants of the same town. We can’t afford to dehumanize, to stereotype, or to accept the traditional prejudices of times past. We don’t have to like each other, but we do have to understand why we act the way we do” (v).

Such a challenge for us and our students is vital and timely. Most definitely, it will be difficult to shake students out of their own egocentric comfort and dualistic perspec­tives simply through the reading of this text and writing about that which they have learned. It is doubtful whether they yet understand, or even care to understand, fellow students who are religiously, culturally, or racially different from themselves, even though they share neighborhoods and classrooms. Grappling successfully for compre­hension of peoples living far from us is, perhaps, something that has so far eluded American adults, certainly our political leaders.

In addition to the text’s display of a powerful international nonfiction prose tradition and its call to expand our own visions in order to better meet the future, this anthology is noteworthy for its easy accessibility to insight into cross-cultural connections. The text is ordered vertically and horizontally to afford students the greatest opportunity to react and hence to relate. First, the selections are grouped by themes that reflect chronological, intellectual, and ethical development. Verburg explains: ‘The selections focus on universal human experiences and concerns; the parts proceed in an order that corre­sponds to an outward movement into larger and increasingly complex social spheres. From the closeness of family life in Part One, the readings move through adolescence to the verge of adulthood in Part Two to the sometimes conflicting pressures of love and gender roles in Part Three. How people respond to the demands of their livelihoods (Part Four) opens into how they cope with the demands of the political systems that regulate their lives (Part Five). Part Six details the dramatic consequences when those systems fail and the results are political violence or outright war.... Finally, Part Seven explores what it means to be abroad in a world where easy generalities. . . have become dearly inadequate” (ix-x). Second, each thematic section begins with the American perspective-with several short excerpts from a variety of American writers, for instance, Bill Cosby and Jane Howard on the American family and Gloria Steinem and Susan Brownmiller on sex roles in this country. These passages set the stage for students to compare and synthesize their own perspectives as Americans with those represented by the ten or so selections extending each theme within a different cultural context.

The problem may well be the perception of some that composition has no content and, therefore, anthologies help to create ideas and texts to fill the void, so to speak, between deadlines for final products. While such a perception is probably antithetical to all we have learned about teaching composition, perhaps we still need to talk about the kind and quality of the professional writing that we might consider for use in the classroom. I suggest a standard has already been set in the writings of Ourselves Among Others.