53 pages • 1 hour read
Walter J. OngOrality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1982A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Preface-Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1: “The Orality of Language”
Preface Summary
The book opens with a short preface to the New Accents series written by the General Editor of the series Terrence Hawkes (1932-2014). Hawkes states that social change in the contemporary period has necessitated a reexamination of assumptions within the social science fields. There has been a consequent restructuring of associated academic disciplines, particularly in literary studies. The New Accents series is a constructive response to this change, one that aims to apply new methods of analysis, to examine new areas of interest going beyond the classic Anglo-American perspective, and to explore new ideas on the relationships between literature and society. Each volume in the series focuses on a particular field of interest but is accessible to readers without specialist knowledge on the subject. These books contain an overview of extant scholarship on their respective topics along with a bibliography. Hawkes hopes that the books of the series will come together as a conversation to help direct future discourse.
Introduction Summary
Ong’s short Introduction outlines the intentions and scope of Orality and Literacy. The book focuses first on defining and describing “oral culture” and then on exploring the impact of literacy on human consciousness and society. There is no established school of thought on the topic of orality, although the subject touches many theories across diverse subjects such as archaeology, philosophy, and language studies. The majority of this book discusses relevant extant scholarship, almost all of which deals with alphabetic writing systems, although Ong will also briefly discuss other scripts and systems.
Recent discoveries have revealed contrasts in the way that knowledge is maintained in oral and in literate cultures. Based on these revelations, Ong presents writing as a relatively new technology that changes the resources available to human consciousness. The effects of writing are compounded and evolved further in societies with high levels of literacy and in those which are affected by the invention of print and electronic communication technologies. Both synchronic and diachronic approaches are necessary to fully explore the orality-literacy dichotomy, although Ong acknowledges that he cannot deal exhaustively with so vast a subject in this single work. He notes that any discussion of orality must be prefaced by a deconstruction of preconceived biases, and he hopes this book will serve to foster a new and deeper understanding of the topic.
Chapter 1, Section 1 Summary: “The Literate Mind and the Oral Past”
Although humans communicate using a range of methods and senses, language is itself fundamentally oral. Speech is the primary mode of communication in all human societies, whereas only a small proportion of languages—current or historical—have ever been committed to writing. Only recently, particularly since Milman Parry’s (1902-1935) work on the Ancient Greek epics, has the oral nature of language been a focus of academic study.
According to Ong, People of “primary oral cultures” (i.e. cultures with no writing) are no less intelligent than literate peoples, but their methods of learning, remembering, and maintaining culture are different. Writing is a technology that increases the linguistic and analytical resources available to an individual and to society. This naturally influences human consciousness and language. The contrast between literate and oral cultures has not yet been studied exhaustively.
Chapter 1, Section 2 Summary: “Did You Say ‘Oral Literature’?”
The academic focus on written rather than spoken language has had widespread ideological consequences. This book aims to refute some of the resultant incorrect biases, assumptions, and misleading terminology. Ong objects to the phrase “oral literature” because its etymological roots falsely imply that oral artforms are deviations from written literature. He acknowledges that there is no ready alternative term, and resolves himself to use self-explanatory circumlocutions instead.
He similarly objects to referring to primary oral cultures as “preliterate” because, Ong claims, orality is more natural than literacy. Oral and written methods of storytelling are essentially different, and speech is not simply the unrecorded equivalent to text. The oral art of primary oral cultures becomes impossible to produce once literacy is introduced and internalized. Writing is, however, a necessary and inevitable development. Literacy allows human consciousness to reach its full potential and many of the advancements of modern society. Hardly any pure primary oral cultures now exist, but the technology of writing is adaptable enough a tool that it can restore and reconstruct the memory of orality.
Preface-Chapter 1 Analysis
Prior to Chapter 1 itself, this section includes a Preface on the series by its editor as well as Ong’s Introduction to the volume. Hawkes was a respected scholar in the field of literacy studies, whose New Accents series achieved its goals of promoting constructive academic conversation in response to rapid social change. His Preface establishes the ideological and academic context in which Ong set out to produce Orality and Literacy.
Ong’s writing style in the Introduction, and throughout the book, marries a direct and informal tone with the precision and clarity of traditional academic style and vocabulary. Ong addresses the reader directly and plainly discusses his own personal experience and perspectives, creating a shared connection with his audience. He also makes use of numerous rhetorical strategies and literary techniques to increase the impact and persuasiveness of his style as well as the flow and clarity of his arguments.
Ong is not committed to maintaining an impartial stance on the subject of orality. His discussion of common terminology in the field edges toward the polemical as he denigrates the use of the word “literature” within the oral sphere as “monstrous.” He uses a striking and thought-provoking analogy to explain his antipathy for defining oral traditions using the vocabulary of literacy: that of trying to describe a horse by working backwards from the concept of a car. The absurdity of this comparison starkly illustrates Ong’s perspective.
Naturally then, Ong does not refer to oral matters with terms whose etymology marks them as literacy-based, such as ‘preliterate,’ or ‘literature,’ or ‘texts.’ He is, however, candid in pointing out the lack of a viable preexisting alternative. By laying out these problems with terminology, Ong not only excuses his own ongoing use of clunky circumlocutions but also highlights a major difficulty associated with pioneering novel fields in academia. Without a large body of established scholarship, precise field-specific technical vocabulary has yet to be collectively decided upon, and must be innovated.
This first chapter introduces, though it does not yet explore in depth, the book’s three major themes. The first of these, The Cognitive and Social Effects of Literacy, is mainly hinted at through Ong’s repeated assertions that oral cultures were drastically and irreversibly changed by the advent of writing. In terms of The Impact of Communication Technologies on Human Interaction and Cultural Development, Ong makes reference to the significance of print and electronic communication technologies in the book’s Introduction. His major focus in this opening section is, however, on convincing his readership that writing is in fact a communication technology rather than a natural expression of language equivalent to speech. This done, Ong then affirms the magnitude of the impact of writing on human cognition, society, and culture, without going into too much depth as to the specifics that are covered in later chapters. As Ong explains in his Introduction, the first order of business in exploring the theme of The Characteristics of Oral and Literate Cultures is to introduce the reader to those aspects of oral culture that are unfamiliar and indeed difficult to conceive of. Many of the contrasting characteristics of literate cultures are familiar to a literate reader, and thus do not take priority in this opening section.
