Orality and Literacy (New Accents) (Paperback)

by Walter J. Ong (Author) "In the past few decades the scholarly world has newly awakened to the oral character of language and to some of the deeper implications of..." (more)
Key Phrases: climactic linear plot, oral verbalization, primary oral culture, Learned Latin, New Criticism, Adam Parry (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Professor Ong has managed to synthesize an incredible amount of thought and at the same time has carried some of his earlier ideas still further. Orality and Literacy should become a classic. It is eminently assignable for undergraduate courses - Professor John Ahern

No comparable work on this important subject exists. Thanks to the lucidity of its style and presentation of complex thought, this is a work that will be accessible and useful...it will be the standard introduction to this topic for some years to come - Choice

Professor Walter Ongs new book explores some of the profound changes in our thought processes, personality and social structures which are the result, at various stages of our history, of the development of speech, writing and print. And he projects his analysis further into the age of mass electronic communications media...the cumulative impact of the book is dazzling. Read this book. Literature will never be the same again. And neither will you - Robert Giddings, Tribune

This admirably lucid book...has obvious implications for philosophy, literature, linguistics, sociology, psychology, education, and Biblical studies...I believe this is the best book Ong has published - Thomas J. Farrell, Cross Currents

This is a book which throws off thought-provoking ideas on every page. - www.mantex.co.uk

Product Description
This classic work explores the vast differences between oral and literate cultures and offers a brilliantly lucid account of the intellectual, literary and social effects of writing, print and electronic technology.

Product Details

• Paperback: 232 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; 2 edition (July 19, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415281296
• ISBN-13: 978-0415281294
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #45,784 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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  #34 in	Books > Reference > Words & Language > Phonetics & Phonics
  #41 in	Books > Reference > Words & Language > Literacy

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Little-heeded Thinker, October 27, 2005

By	Jason M. Silverman (Dublin, Ireland) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book represents a very concise, easy to read summary of much of Ong's work in the area of human communications and technology. The depth of scholarship evident can easily be followed upon by using the wide-ranging bibliography. Ong masterfully takes the idea of the power of the alphabet, and points to the impact this has on human understanding, an impact which has not fully been accepted in philosophy, history, anthropology, sociology, etc. The student and scholar would do well to creatively interact with Ong's work.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stop reading and listen to this!, December 24, 2006

By	Peter FYFE (Erskineville, Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I wish I hadn't read this book... but heard it, for this is a book that deserves the delight that comes from the immediate business of listening to sounds in the air rather than the abstracted business of reading marks on a page (or dulled spots on a screen).

In it, Walter Ong makes a valiant attempt to take us back to a time before text, to a place where we might imagine language as something heard and existing only in its moment, language as something without thee concept of words and letters to chop it up, language as something we hear without imagined structures learned from print, language as something replete with revealing repetitions to aid memory and understanding, something that values the familiar over the novel. He then slowly winds us forward, textual innovation by [con]textual innovation, to the edge of the cyber age, the next unwritten chapter along this vast track.

If you're a reader of books, I'm sure you'll be transported by this adventure beyond your cultural assumptions of what language is and can be. You may find yourself yearning for some of the human experience our world of convenient published accessible text may be denying us, or even hoping some of that experience is still available in specialist forms such as live performance, as I do.

Either way, you'll never hear a book like it.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent summation of and introduction to Ong's thought!, July 29, 2006

By	Thomas J. Farrell (Duluth, MN USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Written to meet the specifications for books in the New Accents series in literary studies, Ong's _Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word_ provides a compendious summation of and introduction to Ong's own work and the work of numerous other scholars interested in studying media ecology, such as Milman Parry, Albert B. Lord, and Eric A. Havelock.

This book by Ong has gone through numerous printings in English and has been translated into 11 other languages. However, the 2nd ed. contains no new material. But it must be referred to as the 2nd ed. because the freshly reset book now contains pagination that differs slightly from the pagination in the 1st ed.

Even though many of the books in the bibliography are now rightly considered to be pioneering studies that should still be required reading for graduate students and scholars who are interested in studies of media ecology, many significant books related to the themes Ong discusses in _Orality and Literacy_ have been published over the last 25 years, such as Jeffrey Walker's _Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity_ (2000), Andrea Wilson Nightingale's _Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in its Cultural Contexts_ (2004), Marco Mostert's numerous edited collections of essays about medieval literacy, and David Michael Levin's _The Philosopher's Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment_ (1999).

As the senior co-editor of _An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry_ (2002), I can wholeheartedly recommend it as a companion volume to read along with Ong's _Orality and Literacy_ as an accessible and sweeping introduction to his thought.

Those who wish to study Ong's thought about media ecology seriously will need to master his 1958 masterwork about visualist tendencies in Western philosophic thought and other significant themes regarding media ecology in Western culture, _Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason_, which the University of Chicago Press brought out in a 3rd ed. in 2004 with a new foreword by Adrian Johns. This book by Ong is one of the pioneering studies of print culture and of media ecology in Western culture. But stand forewarned: this book is not as easy to read, as are _Orality and Literacy_ and _An Ong Reader_. I'd say to start with the latter two books and then work yourself up to reading Ong's 1958 masterwork.

--Thomas J. Farrell, author of Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication (Media Ecology)