This work explores the vast differences between oral and literate
cultures and offers a lucid account of the intellectual, literary
and social effects of writing, print and electronic technology.
Table of contents:
General Editor's Preface. Acknowledgements. Introduction. 1.
The Orality of Language: The literate mind and the oral past; Did
you say 'oral literature'? 2. The modern discovery of
primary oral cultures: Early awareness of oral tradition; The
Homeric question; Milman Parry's discovery; Consequent and
related work. 3. Some psychodynamics of orality: Sounded word as
power and action; You know what you can recall: mneumonics and
formulas; Further characteristics of orally based thought and
expression (I) Addictive rather than subordinative (ii) Aggregative
rather than analytic (iii) Redundant or 'copious' (iv)
Conservative or traditionalist (v) Close to the human lifeworld
(vi) Agonistically toned (vii) Empathetic and participatory rather
then objectively distanced (viii) Homeostatic (ix) Situational
rather than abstract; Oral memorization; Verbomotor lifestyle; The
noetic role of heroic 'heavy' figures and of the bizarre;
The interiority of sound; Orality, community and the sacral; Words
are not signs. 4. Writing restructures consciousness: The new world
of autonomous discourse; Plato, writing and computers; Writing is a
technology; What is 'writing' or 'script'?; Many
scripts but only one alphabet; The onset of literacy; From memory
to written records; Some dynamics of textuality; Distance,
precision, grapholects and magnavocabularies; Interactions:
rhetorics and the places; Interactions: learned languages;
Tenaciousness of orlaity. 5. Print, space and closure:
Hearing-dominance yeilds o sight-dominance; Space and meaning (I)
Indexes (ii) Books, contents and labels (iii) Meaningful surface
(iv) Typographic space; More diffuse effects; Print and closure:
intertexuality; Post-typography: electronics. 6. Oral memory, the
story line and characterisation: The primacy of the story line;
Narrative and oral cultures; Oral memory and the story line;
Closure of plot: travelogue to detective story; The 'round'
character, writing and print. 7. Some theorems: Literary history;
New Criticism and Formalism; Structuralism; Textualists and
deconstructionists; Speech-act and reader-response theory; Social
Sciences, philosophy, biblical studies; Orality, wriitng and being
human; 'Media' versus human communication; The inward turn:
consciousness and the text. Bibliography. Index.
This classic work explores the vast differences between oral and
literate cultures offering a very clear account of the
intellectual, literary and social effects of writing, print and
electronic technology.
In the course of his study, Walter J. Ong offers fascinating
insights into oral genres across the globe and through time, and
examines the rise of abstract philosophical and scientific
thinking. He considers the impact of orality-literacy studies not
only on literary criticism and theory but on our very understanding
of what it is to be a human being, conscious of self and
other.
This is a book no reader, writer or speaker should be
without.
This classic work explores the vast differences between oral and
literate cultures and offers a brilliantly clear account of the
intellectual, literary and social effects of writing, print and
electronic technology.
