Orality and Literacy
Book description
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…
- Coming soon!
Why read it?
2 authors picked Orality and Literacy as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
This book blew my mind when I first read it twenty years ago, and it still seems fresh when I revisit it now.
Our common assumption about language is that it represents the world, plain and simple. However, Ong’s book colorfully captures how differently language was experienced in the oral world before the rise of literacy.
Hearers empathized with speakers and participated in the scenes their words evoked. There was an immersive and tangible sense of commonality that spread through the shared experience of sound, which comes from within one person’s body and enters another person’s body. Language knitted the…
From Robin's list on transforming how you think about language.
Ong was a Jesuit priest and a professor of English literature with a profound knowledge of ancient cultures. He also had a bold thesis: the invention of written language performs a kind of “software rewrite” (NOT his phrase!) on human experience.
This book is his explanation of the differences between cultures dominated by the oral tradition and modern cultures dominated by the written word. Writing makes a whole set of things possible, like lists of arbitrary items, communication without seeing your audience, freeing ideas from reliance on fallible memory, and so serving abstract, analytic thought.
As well as making us…
From Tom's list on understanding the human mind.
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