Notes from the Walter Ong Collection

We’ve updated the Walter J. Ong Collection web site and added a number of items, including

• A section on Ong’s unfinished book Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization, which includes material from and related to the book;
• 13 articles and essays published in Saint Louis University publications between 1939-1979;
• 16 reviews published in Saint Louis University publications between 1940-1984, including Ong’s reviews of Eric Havelock’s Preface to Plato and Brian Stock’s The Implications of Literacy;
• 2 letters in which Ong explains the development of his interest in orality-literacy studies and Marshall McLuhan’s influence on his work;
• 6 new lectures, including “The End of the Age of Literacy,” “The Sound-Sight Split in Latin,” “Worship at the End of the Age of Literacy,” and “Orality, Textuality, and Electronics Unlimited”;
• 6 new images, including two drawings by Ong and a picture of his typewriter; and
• 17 unpublished articles, notes, and fragments, including a working outline for Orality and Literacy, four fragments removed from The Presence of the Word, and a number of lecture notes from the Language as Hermeneutic course files.

Among the files of “Oral Remembering and Narrative Structures” (Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics, 1981: Analyzing Discourse: Text and Talk. Ed. Deborah Tannen. Washington: Georgetown UP, 1982. 12-24) is an outline for the then in-progress Orality and Literacy. For the book’s introduction, Ong writes:

Not a “movement” nor a set of theories (Russian Formalism, Structuralism, new Criticism) but an awareness. No “school” or canon. Not reductionism, but relationism.

Ong reviewed scores of books over the years, often writing insightful review essays rather than simple reviews. A collection of his published reviews would be an education in and of itself. A few of Ong’s reviews are reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry and are well worth reading. While I’m sure having to choose which to include was difficult, I really wish the review of Yates’ The Art of Memory was included, and not just because I have a fondness for all things memory. Looking in the reader, I see that Ong’s review of The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan, 1943-1962 is reprinted there, but I’ll share what I’d intended to share anyways. (more…)

The University of Chicago Press has republished Ong’s Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason, with a forward by Adrian Johns.