'Great Expectations' is French revelation for Edgar Rosenberg

The Norton Critical Edition of Charles Dickens'Great Expectations, edited by English Professor Edgar Rosenberg, has been chosen as required reading for French doctoral and postdoctoral students. Charles Harrington/University Photography

By Franklin Crawford

Edgar Rosenberg got a surprise notice from his editor at Norton earlier this year: the French Ministry of Culture had ordered 10,000 copies of his Norton Critical Edition of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. Rosenberg's book was chosen by the Sorbonne as one of two or three English-language texts that are compulsory reading for all French doctoral and postdoctoral students.

"I'll admit that the idea of 10,000 people walking around in places like Paris, Dijon and Toulouse all bundled up with my book rather appeals to me," said Rosenberg, Cornell professor of English and comparative literature and a former president of the American Dickens Society.

In France, Great Expectations is required reading for the Cours d'Agrégation, a postgraduate examination for doctoral candidates, and for the Certificat d'Aptitude Professionelle d'Enseignment Secondaire, a diploma required for French teachers.

Two faculty grants to England allowed Rosenberg to research Dickens' manuscripts in England, and a commission from Norton to edit Great Expectations led to three textual studies. The current critical edition is a distillation of Rosenberg's work on the novel.

Ask Rosenberg why the Sorbonne selected Dickens at all and he has a number of answers: Great Expectations almost invariably ranks among the top two or three titles on lists of novels college teachers worldwide most want to teach. The formal, near perfection of the book, its exploration of social values, combined with its usual cast of Dickensian characters, make it appealing to the French mind in particular. "And it's shorter than most Dickens novels -- which helps," Rosenberg added.

But ask why the Sorbonne chose his particular edition, and the professor shrugs. Luck? Merit?

"I have absolutely no clue how these things work. All I know is that there are a couple people at the Sorbonne whom I never met, names I don't know, whose books therefore I couldn't have read, who picked my book to read," he said.

Sylvère Monod, of the University of Paris, Sorbonne, sums up the appeal of Rosenberg's book with characteristic French brevity: "Edgar Rosenberg has brilliantly demonstrated that there is no need to be boring in order to be serious."

Rosenberg's editorial light touch with this book was some 20 years in the making. He notes that Dickens penned Great Expectations in eight months.

The author's prolific output was a product of consistency rather than speed, Rosenberg said.

"He hardly ever wrote more than three or four pages a day -- or about 2,500 words," he said.

Rosenberg was born in Fuerth, Bavaria, in 1925, and his childhood took place during Hitler's rise to power. His family left Germany for the United States (via Haiti) in 1939, and Rosenberg learned English quickly, graduating with honors from New York's P.S. 115. He survived a stint with the U.S. infantry in the Ardennes and in 1945 enrolled at Cornell and received his bachelor's in 1949 and then his master's in 1950. He later attended Stanford University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1958. In 1965, he began teaching at Cornell.

A fiction writer himself, Rosenberg has received numerous honors, among them, a Doubleday Fiction Award, a Stanford Fiction Fellowship and a Breadloaf Writing Fellowship. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship to England and a Fulbright Senior Lectureship to Israel. Rosenberg also is well known for his work in Jewish studies.

In 1960, Stanford published his pioneering study From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English Fiction. The book remained in print for nearly 40 years and to his amusement, Rosenberg said it got a mention on page 555 of Simon and Schuster's encyclopedic Timetables of Jewish History , which spans the period from the Ice Age to the breakup of the Soviet Union.

"I'm now in the same league with Abraham, Isaac, Bethe, Hank Greenberg and Bugsy Siegel," Rosenberg said.

Rosenberg's scholarly contributions are duly noted. But his contributions to basic pedagogy here at Cornell are likewise noteworthy. In 1966 the faculty and administration terminated the freshman writing program, which was replaced by the freshman Humanities Writing Program. It was Rosenberg's role to manage the wholesale restructuring of a program that had been exclusively staffed by the English department. The task, he said, was his "most taxing Cornell assignment." The freshman program evolved, with minimal structural changes, into what is now the Knight Writing Program at Cornell.

"That the writing program today, after two sea changes, still lists any number of courses I instituted in 1966 suggests that I did a reasonably successful job," he said.

It's safe to say that the cultural authorities at the Sorbonne also count Rosenberg's Great Expectations as a "reasonably successful job." Or they wouldn't impose it on 10,000 of their own people.