Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (30th anniversary ed. with additional chapters)

Walter J. Ong’s classic work provides a fascinating insight into the social effects of oral, written, printed and electronic technologies, and their impact on philosophical, theological, scientific and literary thought. This thirtieth anniversary edition – coinciding with Ong’s centenary year – reproduces his best-known and most influential book in full and brings it up to date with two new exploratory essays by cultural writer and critic John Hartley. Hartley provides: A scene-setting chapter that situates Ong’s work within the historical and disciplinary context of post-war Americanism and the rise of communication and media studies; A closing chapter that follows up Ong’s work on orality and literacy in relation to evolving media forms, with a discussion of recent criticisms of Ong’s approach, and an assessment of his concept of the ‘evolution of consciousness’; Extensive references to recent scholarship on orality, literacy and the study of knowledge technologies, tracing changes in how we know what we know. These illuminating essays contextualize Ong within recent intellectual history, and display his work’s continuing force in the ongoing study of the relationship between literature and the media, as well as that of psychology, education and sociological thought. Front Cover 1 Orality and Literacy 4 Copyright Page 5 Contents 6 General Editor’s Preface 10 Before Ongism John Hartley 12 Acknowledgements 30 Introduction 32 1 The orality of language 36 The literate mind and the oral past 36 Did you say ‘oral literature’? 41 2 The modern discovery of primary oral cultures 47 Early awareness of oral tradition 47 The Homeric question 48 Milman Parry’s discovery 51 Consequent and related work 58 3 Some psychodynamics of orality 62 Sounded word as power and action 62 You know what you can recall: mnemonics and formulas 64 Further characteristics of orally based thought and expression 67 (i) Additive rather than subordinative 68 (ii) Aggregative rather than analytic 69 (iii) Redundant or ‘copious’ 70 (iv) Conservative or traditionalist 72 (v) Close to the human lifeworld 73 (vi) Agonistically toned 74 (vii) Empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced 76 (viii) Homeostatic 77 (ix) Situational rather than abstract 80 Oral memorization 88 Verbomotor lifestyle 98 The noetic role of heroic ‘heavy’ figures and of the bizarre 100 The interiority of sound 101 Orality, community and the sacral 104 Words are not signs 105 4 Writing restructures consciousness 108 The new world of autonomous discourse 108 Plato, writing and computers 109 Writing is a technology 111 What is ‘writing’ or ‘script’? 113 Many scripts but only one alphabet 115 The onset of literacy 123 From memory to written records 126 Some dynamics of textuality 131 Distance, precision, grapholects and magnavocabularies 133 Interactions: rhetoric and the places 138 Interactions: learned languages 141 Tenaciousness of orality 144 5 Print, space and closure 146 Hearing-dominance yields to sight-dominance 146 Space and meaning 152 (i) Indexes 152 (ii) Books, contents and labels 155 (iii) Meaningful surface 155 (iv) Typographic space 157 More diffuse effects 158 Print and closure: intertextuality 160 Post-typography: electronics 164 6 Oral memory, the story line and characterization 167 The primacy of the story line 167 Narrative and oral cultures 168 Oral memory and the story line 169 Closure of plot: travelogue to detective story 175 The ‘round’ character, writing and print 179 7 Some theorems 184 Literary history 185 New Criticism and Formalism 188 Structuralism 192 Textualists and deconstructionists 193 Speech-act and reader-response theory 197 Social sciences, philosophy, biblical studies 199 Orality, writing and being human 202 ‘Media’ versus human communication 203 The inward turn: consciousness and the text 205 Bibliography 208 Index 225 After Ongism John Hartley 236 References for Hartley Chapters 253 Index for Hartley Chapters 260 "Walter J. Ong's classic work provides a fascinating insight into the social effects of oral, written, printed and electronic technologies, and their impact on philosophical, theological, scientific and literary thought. This thirtieth anniversary edition - coinciding with Ong's centenary year - reproduces his best-known and most influential book in full and brings it up to date with two new exploratory essays by cultural writer and critic John Hartley. Hartley provides: A scene-setting chapter that situates Ong's work within the historical and disciplinary context of post-war Americanism and the rise of communication and media studies; A closing chapter that follows up Ong's work on orality and literacy in relation to evolving media forms, with a discussion of recent criticisms of Ong's approach, and an assessment of his concept of the 'evolution of consciousness'; Extensive references to recent scholarship on orality, literacy and the study of knowledge technologies, tracing changes in how we know what we know. These illuminating essays contextualize Ong within recent intellectual history, and display his work's continuing force in the ongoing study of the relationship between literature and the media, as well as that of psychology, education and sociological thought."--page 4 de la couverture From the blurb: Profound changes in thought processes and in personality and social structures were brought about by the invention of writing and the transformation from one stage of consciousness to another: from primary oral cultures to literate ones. Walter Ong here surveys and interprets the extensive work done during the last few decades, by himself and others, on the differences between orality and literacy.