The Honor and Glory

Welcome to my newest enterprise, Carefully Disordered, a blog dedicated to discussing issues related to literature, education, and the humanities. Topics will focus in particular on the emergence of digital media and its effect on the traditional English literature learning and research environments.

Literature is something I love dearly and have dedicated my life to understanding and teaching, but over the past four years I've watched literature programs grow increasingly irrelevant in universities that no longer value or understand what literature has to offer its students. I want to use this blog to talk about  what literature has to offer in classrooms that are moving quickly in the direction of new media and all of the pedagogical changes that implies. I want to explore ways that teachers of traditional literature can begin to adapt, to change their expectations and methods, and to remediate, so to speak, their curricula to meet the needs of students who will need to engage new kinds of information in new ways.



I chose the title, Carefully Disordered, for a few reasons. The title itself is taken from Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, chapter 82, "The Honor and Glory of Whaling": "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method." The line struck me as particularly appropriate for what I'm trying to do here. I don't think there's one method that works, one formula that can be applied, one answer to the problem. Progress depends instead on taking our time and taking a dis-ordered approach: interrogating, resisting, and revising what has been "ordained" and accepted. It requires defamiliarizing what most of us take for granted about the literary text and literature's role in the classroom and the university—and how we can best serve our students. The title of the chapter itself also seems to make sense. Literature has lost much of its "Honor and Glory," most of us now being reduced to adjunct comp instructors in English departments that now make their money by providing the university with cheap labor. It's imperative that we raise the esteem of literature, like Ishmael attempted to do with whaling, so that the university sees us not as interchangeable and expendable, but indispensable.

Part of my dis-ordered method will be in the subjects I choose to talk about. At first, they may not exactly seem like literature, for instance, television shows, video games, web sites, blogs, digital archives, search engine optimization, ebooks and digitally remediated texts, just to name a few of the things lit in general tends to shy away from, especially in the classroom. But I believe these kinds of "texts" can be successfully integrated into the literature learning environment in ways that will help prepare our students for the kinds of work they may be doing once they leave the university, which may include writing copy, editing professional documents, reviewing popular media, optimizing websites for search engines, understanding the narratives implied by both qualitative and quantitative forms of information. There are places in our literature classrooms, not just our comp classes, for integrating new media that are different from but often just as rich as our traditional, printed texts.