Notes from the Walter Ong Collection

Just in time for the Media Ecology Association’s tenth annual convention here at SLU, Pius Library has launched a new and improved website to showcase the Walter J. Ong papers in our collection.  The site, which will be known as the Walter J. Ong Archives at Saint Louis University, is available at the following URL:

http://libraries.slu.edu/special/digital/ong/index.php

The new website features an improved design and a copy of the archival finding guide to Fr. Ong’s papers.  In addition, there are digitized materials from the collection, including papers, photos, and audio recordings.  More material will be added soon, so please check back or subscribe to our RSS feed for regular updates.

Drew Kupsky
Digital Resources Librarian
Pius XII Memorial Library
Saint Louis University

ST. LOUIS — As e-mail, text messaging and blogging become increasingly part of our everyday lives, Saint Louis University is launching a new center to focus on the work of a scholar who practically predicted the age of the Internet.

Funded through a $1 million University initiative, the Walter J. Ong, S.J., Center for Language and Culture honors the work of Ong (1912-2003), an internationally renowned scholar who spent his nearly 50-year career teaching and researching at SLU.

“The founding of this new center is especially important considering Ong’s pioneering theories of change in language and human communication, which have become more relevant today than ever before,” said Sara van den Berg, Ph.D., chair of the English department and director of the center. “Technology is changing the way we communicate and relate to each other, and the center will give scholars a place to study this rapid revolution.” [Read more.]

Just so it’s clear, the Ong Center itself did not get any where near $1 million dollars from Saint Louis University, but it has been funded by SLU and by ICF Foundation. I mention this on the off chance that someone looking for a new favorite charity reads the $1 million number and thinks the Center’s rolling in money.

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.

Earlier today we talked about scanning and posting Ong’s annotations to his Ramus and Talon Inventory. I’m not sure when he stopped updating his revising copy of the book, but he kept updating the book for years. It turns out that Harvard UP let the copyright expire and Ong renewed the copyright in his own name in 1986. I’m not 100% certain yet, but the plan is to scan the entire book and add it to the Walter J. Ong Collection online.

Breaking News:

Saint Louis University has established a new center of excellence with the creation of theWalter J. Ong, SJ, Center for Language and Culture. The Ong Center honors the work of Walter J. Ong, SJ (1912–2003), an internationally renowned scholar who spent his career in teaching and research at Saint Louis University, where he was Professor of English and of Humanities in Psychiatry, and later University Professor.  [Read more.]

We’ve added four new audio files to the Walter J. Ong Collection’s digital holdings. They are:

• Catholic Education and Man’s Future on Earth. The Sounds of Learning Series. Lecture CL-718. Audiotape. Omaha: Opinion Institute, 1960. (Time: 28:15, 25.8 MB.)
• The Christian and Technological Society. The Sounds of Learning Series. Lecture CL-718. Audiotape. Omaha: Opinion Institute, 1960. (Time: 26:19, 24 MB.)
• The End of the Age of Literacy. The Sounds of Learning Series. Lecture CL-718. Audiotape. Omaha: Opinion Institute, 1960. (Time: 30:46, 28.1 MB.)
• Oral History: Remembering Alice Toklas, John and Simone Brown, and Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. With Claude N. Pavur, S.J. Recorded 10 May 1981. (Time: 15:37, 14.3 MB.)

All together, that makes eight audio files, or over 5 1/2 hours of audio.

In January 1959, Fr. Ong appeared on three episodes of The Catholic Hour, a NBC program produced in cooperation with the National Council of Catholic Men. It was a three-part interview on the subject of “Freedom and the American Catholic,” with John Cogley interviewing Fr. Ong. The shows broadcast on Jan. 4, 11, and 18. While I’ve known about the broadcasts, last week we came across the transcripts of all three shows. We’re contacting NBC to see if we can get permission to put the transcripts online. We’re also asking if we can copies of the video too. If we can, we’ll also ask if we can put the video online. Regardless of whether or not we can, we do want the video for the collection.

Searching the web, I came across this reference to the January 11 broadcast in Time Magazine archives (scroll down to the television listings):

The Catholic Hour (NBC, 1:30-2:30 p.m.). A question-and-answer session in which Catholic Writer John Cogley of the Fund for the Republic and Jesuit Professor (English) Walter J. Ong of St. Louis University examine the tensions between Catholics and non-Catholics in the U.S.

For fun, I just ran Ong’s name through Time’s archive search and found “These Are the Days!” and “Are Comics Fascist?” The first is an April 16, 1956 report on Ong’s presentation to the 14th annual Spring Symposium of the Catholic Renascence Society, and the second is an October 22, 1945 summary of Ong’s publication “Comics and the Superstate: Glimpses Down the Back Alleys of the Mind” (Arizona Quarterly 1.3 (1945): 33-48).

Three new Ong audio recordings have been added to the Ong Collection web site. The pieces are:

• A lecture given at Saint Louis Community College at Forrest Park on Nov. 6, 1972 (Courtesy of Thomas Farrell.)
• An interview of Fr. Ong by Harry Cargas, a transcript of which Ong and Cargas edited and published as “An Interview with Walter J. Ong, S.J.” By Harry James Cargas. Ed. by Harry James Cargas and Walter J. Ong. Webster Review 3.2 (1977): 36-49. (Courtesy of Thomas Farrell.)
• A lecture titled “The Future of Literacy,” given at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Campain on April 28, 1975.

My processing notebooks are full of entires that haven’t been posted, and I’ve been slowly trying to catch up. Today I posted a back-dated entry for March 30, 2006, which is the date I wrote the entry but just got to typing and posting today. Part of the problem is that while I had a computer, I did not have internet access until the last week of August. Normally I’d just leave those months blank and start posting new entries now, but there’s the record, the process, and the date I found something or (re)read something or had some thought is significant in its own right. So I back date entries and it appears as if nothing is going on.

This cartoon (click on the thumbnail to enlarge) ran in The University News in 1972. Ong loved plants and, I’m told, for decades he single-handedly cared for the plants in Pius XII Memorial Library and in Jesuit Hall (the Jesuit residence on campus). Just one of many things you can find on the Walter J. Ong Collection web site. If you haven’t taken a look yet, you don’t know what you’re missing.

I’m pleased to announce, on behalf of the Pius XII Memorial Library at Saint Louis University, that the Walter J. Ong Collection Web site is now live. The Walter J. Ong Collection website seeks to provide scholars, students, and researchers with information about the Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection, to host a digital repository for collection materials, and to serve as a comprehensive resource on the life and works of Walter J. Ong, S.J. Our initial digital offerings include a number of unpublished lectures (typescripts saved as .pdf files), including those from his Lincoln Lecture Series in Africa in 1974, an audio recording of a lecture, and a number of photographs of Walter J. Ong and his family.

There will be much more to come over the next few months, and, really, many years to come.