The British popular culture icon Sherlock Holmes came before his public at a time of great instability—post-French Revolution threats to monarchism, post-industrial revolution urban displacement. Amateur author and physician Arthur Conan Doyle stepped in to teach Scotland Yard how to investigate crime professionally based on the medical practice of patient diagnosis and the insights of forensic science in its infancy. Shortly after Doyle’s first fictional “how-to” manual, Jack-the-Ripper took lethal advantage of the political and social volatility with a four-month rampage targeting homeless women “living rough” in the streets of Whitechapel.
Twenty-first-century US has remarkable similarities. The paradigm shift from print to digital technology has affected compositional practices in profound ways. The concentration of wealth among the few has created overwhelming precarity for most of society, including members of composition classrooms. Post-modernity calls upon Sherlock for enlightenment. Steven Moffat’s and Mark Gatiss’ BBC-One series combines digital technology and digitally-mediated language to assist Holmes & Dr. Watson in the art of deduction—ripe for digital native composition students. Their own digitally rich language—regardless of their mother tongue—is Internet-mediated and image-saturated. Holmes and Watson also share much of the economic insecurity of writing classroom members. Thus, the print-centric, economically precarious world of Arthur Conan Doyle gives way to the image-centric, economically precarious world of Sherlock and the digital matrix.
This paper argues that using popular culture texts for inspiration in a composition course has a commonality with the beat generation artists of the 1950s who set out to shape an unconventional and unauthorized aesthetic. In fact, the time is ripe for privileging more unsanctioned discourses and practices within the academy. Using precarity theory along with cognitive and socio-cultural composition theory, this paper uses the inhabitants of 221-B Baker Street as continuing models of precarity and critical and cultural thinking.
About the presenterKaren R Veselits
Dr. Karen R. Veselits teaches in the freshman writing program at Georgian Court University and serves as a professional tutor in the campus writing center. She holds a PhD in American Studies from the College of William & Mary.