Notes from the Walter Ong Collection

“A Thought on Poetry and Universities” is a three-page typescript, dating to 1971, which was in a folder with a number of other typescripts, all labeled “Unpublished Material: Inactive.” From now on, it will also be known as Folder 16 of Series 1.D.

The last paragraph reads:

Orientation to the future, which is not the same as futurism or even future shock, is at present an essential of human experience and apparently will be an essential from now on through history. Perhaps, surprisingly, it is not easy for poets, as I have attempted [to] show elsewhere, to be future-oriented in depth. For this, not only poets but humanists generally need to be more at home with diversified fields of knowledge, not only with our vastly expanded humanities but also with the sciences and technology, than most of us are. Humanists are often too fearful of science and technology, which are human creations if they are anything. We need a poetry that can include them and the rest of our growng awarenesses, not just carpingly but also critically, because understandingly.

In the Language as Hermeneutic course files (not the same as the Language as Hermeneutic book manuscript files) there are a number of fragmentary pieces that are, more or less, notes for the book as well as notes for the class. One such piece is “Intertextuality as Retrieval of Orality”:

The commonplace tradition and the doctrine of imitation ruled verbal expression from primary orality through the age of residual orality terminated by romanticism. In the commonplace tradition, the echoing of earlier utterance was encouraged and taught.

Intertextuality has attacked the fixity of the text, which had made the text in the first place the primary focus of interpretation.

Reader-oriented criticism has also attacked the fixity of the text.

Derrida’s Glas the ultimate: everything fits and misfits everything else, echoes everything (Culler.)

The discovery that echoing and reechoing is so pervasive in Text, Writing, and  Ècriture is really a retrieval of orality, a hint of the oral base of text.

The whole economy of orality is repetition, echoing, imitation.

Discourse (oral—and written, too, if there is such a thing) is essentially echoing (cf. catechesis), repetition, imitation. A response to a question echoes the question.

All this shows how deeply language is basically a call, a cry, rather than mere transfer of information.

Analogy between (1) oral person’s paraphrasing a statement when asked to repeat it (question sets up a new context) and (2) different readers’ readings of a text (always put into a new situation).

A handwritten note in the upper left-hand corner reads: “All this is in effect said in “Before Textuality: orality and Interpretation.”

Since I’ve had difficulty in getting offprints of my own work, I’m often struck by the number of offprints, even full issues, Fr. Ong had sent to people. Requests weren’t always filled or filled in full, but they often were. For instance, Ong had offprints of “Renaissance Ideas and the American Catholic Mind” sent to 86 people and he had full issues sent to another 51 people without charge! People on the lists included T.S. Eliot, F.R. Levis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Richard McKeon, Erich Auerbach, Marshall McLuhan, Bill Wimsatt, and Francis P. Magoun, Jr.

There might be enough material in the collection for someone (not me) to write an article on Ong and the American Comic. Source material would likely include material from the following publication files:

• “Mickey Mouse and Americanism.” America 65.26 (4 Oct. 1941): 719-20.
• “The Comics and the Super State: Glimpses Down the Back Alley’s of the Mind.” Arizona Quarterly 1.3 (1945): 34-48. (See also the Regis College teaching files for other potential leads.)
• “Bogey Sticks for Pogo Men.” America 84.15 (13 Jan. 1951): 434-35.

Yesterday, I gave a long preface to this post, a definition of medium theory from Joshua Meyrowitz’s “Taking McLuhan and ‘Medium Theory’ Seriously: Technological Change and the Evolution of Education” (Technology and the Future of Schooling: Ninety-fifth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education. Part II. Ed. Stephen T. Kerr. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. 73-110).

Meyrowitz writes: (more…)

I particularly fond of the term medium theory as a description of one of my major research interests, though I’m often met by blank stares when I use it. Time and again, I’m told that “media studies” would be a much better term. To me, to say one does media studies is like saying one studies literature or rhetoric. True in and of itself, but not overly useful as a short label used to explain the type of research one is to do. I’m not particularly interested in studying film (as media), television, radio, newspapers, magazines, music, and the like, the things people mean when they say “the media.” For the most part, my interest really does lie in the medium. I do study “the message” but that’s when I wear either my literature or my rhet/comp hats, though, of course, I strongly believe that I’m rarely wearing one hat at a time. (more…)