Cover Page
Half Title Page
Frontmatter 1
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
General Editor’s Preface
Before Ongism John Hartley
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: Mnemonics and Formulas
Further Characteristics of Orally Based Thought and Expression
(i) Additive 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 than 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: Rhetoric and the Places
Interactions: Learned Languages
Tenaciousness of Orality
5 Print, space and closure
Hearing-dominance Yields to Sight-Dominance
Space and Meaning
(i) Indexes
(ii) Books, Contents and Labels
(iii) Meaningful Surface
(iv) Typographic Space
More Diffuse Effects
Print and Closure: Intertextuality
Post-typography: Electronics
6 Oral memory, the story line and characterization
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, Writing and Being Human
‘media' versus Human Communication
The Inward Turn: Consciousness and the Text
Bibliography
Index
After Ongism John Hartley
References for Hartley Chapters
Index for Hartley 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.