More details are available here.

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

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.

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.

The first is from talking points Ong wrote for a guest lecture to Vincent Casaregola’s “Rhetorical Theory and Discourse Pedagogy” course here at Saint Louis University on 15 March 1993. In it, Ong writes:

2. Effect of electronics (first pre-elecrtronic gramophone or mechanical, non-electric phonograph or gramophone [1857, Edison 1877]; electricity in electric telegraph (1837), telephone (1876), crystal-set radio; electronics emerging around 1920s, vacuum tube). Effects multiple and endless: secondary orality (dependent on writing, but results resemble primary orality (EXPLAIN–spontaneity of ’60s). But also “secondary visualism” indefinitely enhanced visual field (graphics, &c), “virutal reality.” Digitization: timepieces commonest experiences of the digitization of the nondigitizable; Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory. Musicians’ rejection of digitized music as unreal. For you deal with: hypertext (George P. Landow’s Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology), footnoting footnotes on footnotes on footnotes: everything on any subject (but what is a “subject”?). Comparable development < --- information increase and explosion: old-time history (residual orality: past=action of "heavy" figures) > les annalistes (Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood) > the “new history” > Mentalitiés/Mentalities.

The second is from a one-page, single-spaced printout titled “Notanda for Informal Response,” written for the 1995 Midwest Modern Language Association Annual Convention session “Presences of the Word: Ong Studies for the 21st Century.” In it, Ong writes:

Orality-literacy studies have always been an open field. No one can pretend ever to have said the last word. In orality-literacy studies, now is the time when, more than ever before, we should study interactions. To do this we must be aware of the characteristics of (among other things):

Primary orality.

Oral residue after writing and writing’s sequels. My PW, OL, &c.² Very helpful: Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy.

Secondary orality (orality interacting with writing, print, and electronics): not only in the electronic age (to which I first applied the term, directly to radio and television) but also in the manuscript and print ages and postmodern deconstruction. Paul, close of 2 Thess.

In addition, secondary visualism of manuscript age, and much more of print age (exactly repeatable visual statement) and of electronic communication (graphics).

Internet: basically visual (computer screen) and hence inevitably distancing (you cannot know for sure the identity of the person with whom you are communicating). Because of the at least unconsciously sensed distancing, compulsive preoccupation with intimacy (featured achievement: out of the millions who correspond on internet, two eventually marry one another–featured story proving great and pervading intimacy!) A reason for compulsive preoccupation with intimacy: rapidity of electronic interchange of thought between two persons creates an environment like–but not the same as–that voice, vocal exchange, sound, in face-to-face interaction. But virtual reality is by definition not face-to-face. Cf. Bukatman, Terminal Identity (subconscious suppressed).

1. For other references to secondary visualism and secondary literacy, see both my post “Ong on Secondary Orality and Secondary Literacy” and Ong’s unpublished lecture “Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism.” [back]
2. The Presence of the Word and Orality and Literacy. [back]

• 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.

Chinese archaeologists studying ancient rock carvings say they have evidence that modern Chinese script is thousands of years older than previously thought.

State media say researchers identified more than 2,000 pictorial symbols dating back 8,000 years, on cliff faces in the north-west of the country. [Read more.]

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.]

Orality and Literacy 2.0

Saturday, May 19, 3:45 - 5:00 PM, Room B

Sound in Text: Lost Jokes and Secondary Orality 2.0 (Patricia Sullivan, Purdue University)

As students of Walter Ong may assert, his sense of humor was dry, and often language-based. Father Ong punned and played with language, often embedding jokes in his books and essays. Too many of these jokes are lost on readers who have not heard Ong speak, who did not laugh along with his witty and wry turns of phrase.

One such instance of sound in text is Ong’s Foreword to Pedro Lain Entralgo’s 1970 The Therapy of the Word in Classical Antiquity (1970). Ong’s joking centers on the immediacy of sound, punning and playing on the connection between hearing both the word “buffalo” and the sounds the animal itself would make. “Buffalo:” hearing the word is not the same as hearing the animal, and hearing the name of the animal is not the same as hearing the animal. These tendrils of sound, echoing through Ong’s text and in our readings, represent the layers of interpretation separating us from the visceral experience, as I am limited in this proposal to describing the hair-raising experience of feeling the buffalo’s breath rather than feeling my hair stand on end, my heart pump, the rush of adrenaline, accompanying the realization that here is a buffalo. “If he hears a buffalo, he had better watch out: something is going on. No other sensory field has this dynamism which marks the field of sound.”

So on this anniversary of Ong’s Orality and Literacy, let us not forget the layers of interpretation, of symbolization and interpretation, that already separate the literate mind from the visceral experience, and consider both the symbolic verbal mastery of the scholar as he taught us to appreciate the beauty of the word in its many manifestations, the power of the word, and the power of the unmediated sound that washes over our skin, raising gooseflesh and releasing adrenaline, inspiring us to not to reflection and inner analysis but animal response to fight or flight. As the computers and writing community adds sound: music, noise,ambiance, and feedback, to multimodal texts, let us recall Ong’s work with sound in the text.

My Blog and My Essay Sound Different, or the Presence of Orality in Our Written Word (Gina Merys, Creighton University)

What this presentation advocates is training our ears to hear the polyphony of voices that is at once background noise and the source of power for students learning how to use language in all of its modes for all of its rhetorical purposes; genuine vocality that becomes textual space in this complex layered sense of order.

Because textuality depends so much on orality, and vice versa, it is counter-productive to separate these two modes of communicating when looking at the palimpsestic nature of classroom language. In fact, as Walter Ong states in Orality and Literacy, in literate cultures orality depends on textuality because “once the chirographically initiated feel for precision and analytic exactitude is interiorized, it can feed back into speech, and does” (103). Further, what I argue is that the ways in which students internalize the “sound” of oral communication shows up to different degrees in their writing. Thus, they hear the way they sound in their writing and approve or disapprove of that writing according to how much or how little it relates to the way they speak. While they enjoy hearing the text of their online writing, they tend to distance that voice in academic writing often to the detriment of meaning. Hence, if students could learn to use their orality in all types of writing, they could more easily learn about effective communication.

Convergence: Bridging the Oral-Visual Divide (Andrea Murphy, Old Dominion University)

Human communication can be thought of as a mixture of the oral and the visual. Primary orality exists within a context of face-to-face communication. Although the inventions of writing and subsequently print moved communication into a visual and spatial context, it remained fundamentally dependent on language. Finally, with the advent of secondary orality, prompted by such inventions as radio and television, communication took a turn back towards the oral, albeit a self-conscious and deliberate orality reliant on print. However, new advances in technology must prompt either an altered definition of secondary orality or the invention of a new term altogether.

Later in life, Walter Ong (in “Information and/or Communication”) defined “secondary orality” as being an age where orality itself is accorded, through the machines made possible by writing and print, the permanence and reproducibility found previously only in more visual mediums. This paper argues that it is this definition of “secondary orality” that points towards a future not of oral-visual contrasts, but instead one marked by a convergence of oral and visual modes of communication.

With the advent of the Internet and digital mediums, this age of “secondary orality” is becoming one where it possible for a single person to potentially communicate with billions synchronically and diachronically, drawing on the sense of immediacy grained in orality as well as the informational dense visual complexity afforded through hypermedia. Nevertheless, the audiences created by these new media are fundamentally limited, not by the range of the speaker’s voice as in the era of primary orality, but by the interests and attention span of the individual founded in print.

Editing the Sound-text: Waveform Alphabet as Orality and Literacy 2.0 (Michael Salvo, Purdue University)

While using Audacity to clean up a recorded lecture, I realized that I was visually manipulating sound files, that I was editing visual sound-wave form representations of speech in Audacity. In other words, I had stopped listening to the sound files and was visually editing the aural text. I had begun removing speech stammers — all the “um,” “uh,” “oh”, “er,” and pauses that had become visually distinguishable from words and other sounds, sounds that I wanted to save as content. I was, techno-visually, playing with sound and editing text, actually, editing speech. Later in the day, I was able to clean up the tense inconsistencies by recognizing the addition of “ess” or S.

Audacity is but one example of a class of sound-manipulation tools, Garageband among them, that create a visual representation of the sound waveform to aid in sound editing. Visually representing this sonic waveform adds another in a series of symbols for the spoken word, another layer of the technologized word. Ong might be excited, might be puzzled, but certainly would be interested in this new waveform alphabet that Audacity and Garageband use to enable the further symbolization of the word, offering a new waveform alphabet for the manipulation of speech, a new alphabet alongside ancient symbol systems. From one phoneme emerges a tale of secondary orality, a further site of the technologization of the word, and an alphabetic system supporting multimodal composing. This is a post-textual literate symbol system.

This presentation will introduce Audacity as a site for the development of this waveform alphabet, as an example of the further technologization of the word, as we move towards multimodal, post-textual literacy.

Cross posted to Machina Memorialis.