preface

In today’s consumerist culture of book sales and information technology we can still discern the intellectual traditions of solitude and bodily restraint that were established in medieval book culture, and which informed prevailing attitudes of austerity, discipline and detachment in the universities of Europe. These led to the metaphor of scholastic ‘rigour’,2 aterm of approval still applied in the modern research context, despite the emergence of networked information systems that work at the speed of light, and which speak of ‘fluency’, immediacy and (ex)change rather than ‘stillness’ and ‘fixity’. Furthermore, most academics still favour methods of writing that mask any directly personal feeling or knowledge. They ask students to write in a generalised and unsituated way and to refrain from indexical or contingent assertions and arguments. For similar reasons, they would be unlikely to praise the ‘bench manual’ as a model for academic writing. Students are seldom asked to write ‘with’, to write ‘for’, or to write ‘to’ specific ‘writerreaders’. The effects have been manifold. The myth that writing is somehow a direct, linear transcription of facts or truths survives as a tacit conspiracy that renders us amnesiac about the situated and creative practice of writing. Because monastic conventions have demanded that the book must be totalising, comprehensive and selfdenying, conventional academic wisdom tends to remain sentential, using oratorical stances, narrative sequences and the logic of deduction and induction.3