Hartley John - Orality and literacy: the technologizing of the word

No doubt a third General Editors Preface to New Accents seems hard to justify. What is there left to say? Twenty-five years ago, the series began with a very clear purpose. Its major concern was the newly perplexed world of academic literary studies, where hectic monsters called Theory, Linguistics and Politics ranged. In particular, it aimed itself at those undergraduates or beginning postgraduate students who were either learning to come to terms with the new developments or were being sternly warned against them.

New Accents deliberately took sides. Thus the first Preface spoke darkly, in 1977, of a time of rapid and radical social change, of the erosion of the assumptions and presuppositions central to the study of literature. Modes and categories inherited from the past it announced, no longer seem to fit the reality experienced by a new generation. The aim of each volume would be to encourage rather than resist the process of change by combining nuts-and-bolts exposition of new ideas with clear and detailed explanation of related conceptual developments. If mystification (or downright demonization) was the enemy, lucidity (with a nod to the compromises inevitably at stake there) became a friend. If a distinctive discourse of the future beckoned, we wanted at least to be able to understand it.

With the apocalypse duly noted, the second Preface proceeded piously to fret over the nature of whatever rough beast might stagger portentously from the rubble. How can we recognise or deal with the new?, it complained, reporting nevertheless the dismaying advance of a host of barely respectable activities for which we have no reassuring names and promising a programme of wary surveillance at the boundaries of the precedented and at the limit of the thinkable. Its conclusion, the unthinkable, after all, is that which covertly shapes our thoughts may rank as a truism. But in so far as it offered some sort of useable purchase on a world of crumbling certainties, it is not to be blushed for.