You might be interested to know what I am thinking about, reading into, researching around, and generally speaking, currently working on as a writer. I, too, have to compost. But I also have to write and seek to publish in order to figure it out. A good deal of what this project delves into will enter into, and continue to come out of, my teaching. Most specifically, the course you are taking.
Work in Progress:
The Scholar’s Information: Emerson’s Education in an Electronic Age
What becomes of Emerson’s Scholar in the Age of Google? The Scholar’s Information offers two firsts in Emerson studies: the first book to study Emerson’s sustained (and largely forgotten) interest in the theory and practice of education and the first to consider Emerson’s writing in relation to digital communication. Emerson’s understanding of the cultural and pedagogical implications of mediation in his own age of electronic communication can shed light on where we now find ourselves in education generally, literary education specifically. In elucidating a web of relations between new and old media, between Emerson’s education and Google’s scholar, I focus on Emerson’s crucial conception of metonymy as the basis for learning—indeed, for all thinking. This notion of metonymy links Emersonian analogy with an associational thinking that is prominent in conceptions of hypertext and emphasized in definitions of digital literacy. I am interested in what this technological correspondence between the information of Emersonian intellect and electronic pedagogy can teach us about the emergence of digital communication in the humanities—and more specifically, how the study of literature and writing can be reconfigured in light of that emergence. While focusing on Emerson’s conception of literary education, this project will also range among other versions of a metonymic pedagogy I locate in Emerson: in Benjamin Franklin’s plans for an English school; in Whitman’s “Democratic Vistas”; in the theories of John Dewey; in the emergence of cybernetics and information technologies; and most recently in calls for a rethinking of English and composition studies in arguments put forth by Robert Scholes and Richard Lanham.
Thus far I have completed research on Emerson manuscripts while I was Emerson Memorial Association Fellow at Houghton Library, Harvard University and published an initial article in Emerson Society Papers 2006. Presented on Whitman and digital archives (“Parts of the Actual Distraction”) at two conferences and am revising for article publication. I am applying for a fellowship from The Library Company of Philadelphia to research 18th century grammar and rhetoric texts and to complete an article/chapter “Learning at Hand: Benjamin Franklin’s Writing Pedagogy.” Up next is the chapter, “Googling Emerson: The American Scholar and Vannevar Bush’s Memex.”
