Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the WordWalter Ong's book is a compendium of others on like topics: Eric Havelock, Albert Lord, Basil Bernstein, himself, etc. But more than a gathering, it is a statement, clear, though not concise, meaningful in the broadest sense. The book splays out from a seeming center, that of the historical invention of writing, affecting a diversity of disciplines, from information theory to philosophy, from technology to Freud, from literature to television to computers to law to education to behaviorism to ... well, to civilization itself. The nature of his thesis is this: that the introduction of writing and, later, of print brought about a lasting and irreversible transformation of thought process, of personality, and of social structures so that what went before, orality, is clearly distinguishable from what came after, literacy. -- from http://www.jstor.org (Sep. 24, 2014). |
Contents
The orality of language | 5 |
The modern discovery of primary oral cultures | 16 |
Some psychodynamics of orality | 31 |
Copyright | |
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abstract Adam Parry alphabet analytic ancient Greek audience CALIFORNIA/SANTA CRUZ century character Chinese chirographic Clanchy classical antiquity climactic commonly communication Concrete poetry consciousness contrast CRUZ The University deeply interiorized developed dialects discourse effects electronic English epic episodic formulas genre Goody grapholect Greek alphabet Havelock Homeric Iliad kind language Learned Latin lengthy letterpress print linguistic literate logocentrism London Manuscript culture medieval memory Milman Parry mind modern narrator noetic novel old oral oral literature oral narrative oral performance Oral Poetry oral tradition oral world orality and literacy orality-literacy organization Parry's persons pictographic Plato plot poem poetry present primary oral culture processes reader residually oral rhetoric script secondary orality Semitic sense simply sound space spoken word story structure style term textual textualists thought and expression tion typographic University Library UNIVERSITY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA/SANTA University Press utterance verbatim visual vowel writing and print written text