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Product Description
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.
About the Author
Walter J. Ong is University Professor Emeritus at Saint Louis University, USA, where he was previously Professor of English and Professor of Humanities in Psychiatry. His many publications have been highly influential for studies in the evolution of the consciousness.
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First Sentence
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 the contrasts between orality and writing. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
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 the contrasts between orality and writing. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Marvellous and enjoyable,
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Orality and Literacy (Paperback)
If you judge only by the book's title, the book could seem uninteresting or dried. But the story is totally different. It is astonishingly thought-provoking and eye-opening. It makes me perplexed that there are not any single review of this great and classic book. In human history, writing or literacy is a very recent phenomenon, only about 6000 years old, though most of us think that it has been with us from the beginning, together with oral speech. In fact, this misconception could lead easily to insufficient and distorted understanding of human communications and finally mankind itself. OK, let's assume that someone has a sketch knowledge that sometime long ago in ancient times, in Mesopotamia or Egypt, the first letters or pictographs came to be invented and used, from which and then through Phoenicians, English alphabet came into being. But, only with it, he or she cannot comprehend many significant and various aspects in human culture and mind. The influence and impact of orality and literacy on us is by far wider and deeper than we normally think or guess. Still many peoples live without written letters and only very recently we have come to see and use alphabets in daily lives. Considering orality's much longer history, literacy is a unfamiliar and in some sense, strange one. Without the full grasp of how our ancestors had thought without any visual letters, we cannot access or imagine their minds. This book gives you the right way to understand how our ancestors see their world differently from us and how our thinking are being changed by shift from orality to letters. Marvellous and readable book. If your interests are mind, language, anthropology and communication, you will definatley enjoy reading this.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.3 out of 5 stars (15 customer reviews) 18 of 20 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Little-heeded Thinker,
By Jason M. Silverman - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Orality and Literacy (Paperback)
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.
20 of 24 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stop reading and listen to this!,
By Peter FYFE - Published on Amazon.com
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This review is from: Orality and Literacy (Paperback)
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 7 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
An eye opener,
By J. Pesenti - Published on Amazon.com
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This review is from: Orality and Literacy (Paperback)
We type, we print. This is technology. We speak, we write, we read. This is human nature. Or is it?Printing and computers emerged as technology. But so did writing. Writing is so natural to us that we forget it is a human creation - we can not even name what came before it (oral literature is a revealing oxymoron). Ong convinces us that writing restructured our consciousness, and so does this little book. This technical, scholarly and at time tedious book is an eye opener. It shows that what seems like a given is possibly the most fundamental reshaping of ourselves in the history of humanity. Those fond of Homer or Plato will wonder how they could have studied them seriously without the prism of orality vs literacy. The Iliad and Odyssey are oral poems - can we imagine what it takes to compose a tens of thousand words epic without taking a single note, without writing a single verse and without an outline? The Socrates discourses - discourses! - are the first steps of written analytic thoughts in a Society were rhetoric was king. Beyond antic work the orality perspective is relevant for the full history of thoughts. Literature became less and less influenced by the oral constraints, shifting from the episodic epics to the modern well constructed novel. Teaching evolved from recitation and rhetoric to analytical thoughts. Grasping orality allows a better understanding of human nature, not only by offering a glimpse of what primitive society's thoughts might be, but by putting the evolution of thoughts in a new light. Differences in today's societies often reflect their degree of literacy, i.e., the maturity of their written thought process. The Flynt effect - the significant increase in IQ in western societies over the last century - is a symptom of this influence. Societies only recently exposed to writing fair much lower on IQ tests. IQ tests that western experts devised to be a-cultural are in fact rooted in an advanced writing-centric culture. So much that the experts themselves are oblivious to that effect (the more a-cultural the test the stronger the Flynnt effect). Ong wants us to glimpse into what our consciousness was before writing, to feel it if not to adopt it, and to understand how transformative that emergence must have been. |
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