- Hardcover: 216 pages
- Publisher: Routledge; 2 edition (23 May 2002)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0415281288
- ISBN-13: 978-0415281287
- Product Dimensions: 20.1 x 13.2 x 2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 3,060,829 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
Orality and Literacy
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
|
There is a newer edition of this item:
|
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
This classic work explores the vast differences between oral and literate cultures offering a very clear account of the intellectual, literary and social effects of writing, print and electronic technology.
In the course of his study, Walter J. Ong offers fascinating insights into oral genres across the globe and through time, and examines the rise of abstract philosophical and scientific thinking. He considers the impact of orality-literacy studies not only on literary criticism and theory but on our very understanding of what it is to be a human being, conscious of self and other.
This is a book no reader, writer or speaker should be without.
About the Author
Walter J. Ong is University Professor Emeritus at Saint Louis University, USA, where he was previously Professor of English and Professor of Humanities in Psychiatry. His many publications have been highly influential for studies in the evolution of the consciousness.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
In the past few decades the scholarly world has newly awakened to the oral character of language and to some of the deeper implications of the contrasts between orality and writing. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
In the past few decades the scholarly world has newly awakened to the oral character of language and to some of the deeper implications of the contrasts between orality and writing. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A very good book, the first one to analyse how new technologies push complex societies to re-enable forgotten communicational practices typical of "primitive" societies.
Describes the shift from our written culture to one of "secondary orality", the abundance of hints for inspiration and the absolute novelty of the subject approached, the pointedness of the analysis made this book since 20 years an all-time favourite for those who are interested in society and new technologies and got tired of old MacLuhan
Describes the shift from our written culture to one of "secondary orality", the abundance of hints for inspiration and the absolute novelty of the subject approached, the pointedness of the analysis made this book since 20 years an all-time favourite for those who are interested in society and new technologies and got tired of old MacLuhan
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is a truly well written and seminal book. If you have never heard of "orality" before it is a superb introduction and it then moves to an advanced level. Truly a remarkable amount of work in a small number of pages, hugely influential and in double-figures on reprints.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
15 reviews
19 of 21 people found the following review helpful
Little-heeded Thinker
27 Oct 2005
Format:Paperback
This book represents a very concise, easy to read summary of much of Ong's work in the area of human communications and technology. The depth of scholarship evident can easily be followed upon by using the wide-ranging bibliography. Ong masterfully takes the idea of the power of the alphabet, and points to the impact this has on human understanding, an impact which has not fully been accepted in philosophy, history, anthropology, sociology, etc. The student and scholar would do well to creatively interact with Ong's work.
20 of 24 people found the following review helpful
Stop reading and listen to this!
25 Dec 2006
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I wish I hadn't read this book... but heard it, for this is a book that deserves the delight that comes from the immediate business of listening to sounds in the air rather than the abstracted business of reading marks on a page (or dulled spots on a screen).
In it, Walter Ong makes a valiant attempt to take us back to a time before text, to a place where we might imagine language as something heard and existing only in its moment, language as something without thee concept of words and letters to chop it up, language as something we hear without imagined structures learned from print, language as something replete with revealing repetitions to aid memory and understanding, something that values the familiar over the novel. He then slowly winds us forward, textual innovation by [con]textual innovation, to the edge of the cyber age, the next unwritten chapter along this vast track.
If you're a reader of books, I'm sure you'll be transported by this adventure beyond your cultural assumptions of what language is and can be. You may find yourself yearning for some of the human experience our world of convenient published accessible text may be denying us, or even hoping some of that experience is still available in specialist forms such as live performance, as I do.
Either way, you'll never hear a book like it.
In it, Walter Ong makes a valiant attempt to take us back to a time before text, to a place where we might imagine language as something heard and existing only in its moment, language as something without thee concept of words and letters to chop it up, language as something we hear without imagined structures learned from print, language as something replete with revealing repetitions to aid memory and understanding, something that values the familiar over the novel. He then slowly winds us forward, textual innovation by [con]textual innovation, to the edge of the cyber age, the next unwritten chapter along this vast track.
If you're a reader of books, I'm sure you'll be transported by this adventure beyond your cultural assumptions of what language is and can be. You may find yourself yearning for some of the human experience our world of convenient published accessible text may be denying us, or even hoping some of that experience is still available in specialist forms such as live performance, as I do.
Either way, you'll never hear a book like it.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
An eye opener
28 Sep 2009
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
We type, we print. This is technology. We speak, we write, we read. This is human nature. Or is it?
Printing and computers emerged as technology. But so did writing. Writing is so natural to us that we forget it is a human creation - we can not even name what came before it (oral literature is a revealing oxymoron).
Ong convinces us that writing restructured our consciousness, and so does this little book. This technical, scholarly and at time tedious book is an eye opener. It shows that what seems like a given is possibly the most fundamental reshaping of ourselves in the history of humanity.
Those fond of Homer or Plato will wonder how they could have studied them seriously without the prism of orality vs literacy. The Iliad and Odyssey are oral poems - can we imagine what it takes to compose a tens of thousand words epic without taking a single note, without writing a single verse and without an outline? The Socrates discourses - discourses! - are the first steps of written analytic thoughts in a Society were rhetoric was king.
Beyond antic work the orality perspective is relevant for the full history of thoughts. Literature became less and less influenced by the oral constraints, shifting from the episodic epics to the modern well constructed novel. Teaching evolved from recitation and rhetoric to analytical thoughts.
Grasping orality allows a better understanding of human nature, not only by offering a glimpse of what primitive society's thoughts might be, but by putting the evolution of thoughts in a new light. Differences in today's societies often reflect their degree of literacy, i.e., the maturity of their written thought process. The Flynt effect - the significant increase in IQ in western societies over the last century - is a symptom of this influence. Societies only recently exposed to writing fair much lower on IQ tests. IQ tests that western experts devised to be a-cultural are in fact rooted in an advanced writing-centric culture. So much that the experts themselves are oblivious to that effect (the more a-cultural the test the stronger the Flynnt effect).
Ong wants us to glimpse into what our consciousness was before writing, to feel it if not to adopt it, and to understand how transformative that emergence must have been.
Printing and computers emerged as technology. But so did writing. Writing is so natural to us that we forget it is a human creation - we can not even name what came before it (oral literature is a revealing oxymoron).
Ong convinces us that writing restructured our consciousness, and so does this little book. This technical, scholarly and at time tedious book is an eye opener. It shows that what seems like a given is possibly the most fundamental reshaping of ourselves in the history of humanity.
Those fond of Homer or Plato will wonder how they could have studied them seriously without the prism of orality vs literacy. The Iliad and Odyssey are oral poems - can we imagine what it takes to compose a tens of thousand words epic without taking a single note, without writing a single verse and without an outline? The Socrates discourses - discourses! - are the first steps of written analytic thoughts in a Society were rhetoric was king.
Beyond antic work the orality perspective is relevant for the full history of thoughts. Literature became less and less influenced by the oral constraints, shifting from the episodic epics to the modern well constructed novel. Teaching evolved from recitation and rhetoric to analytical thoughts.
Grasping orality allows a better understanding of human nature, not only by offering a glimpse of what primitive society's thoughts might be, but by putting the evolution of thoughts in a new light. Differences in today's societies often reflect their degree of literacy, i.e., the maturity of their written thought process. The Flynt effect - the significant increase in IQ in western societies over the last century - is a symptom of this influence. Societies only recently exposed to writing fair much lower on IQ tests. IQ tests that western experts devised to be a-cultural are in fact rooted in an advanced writing-centric culture. So much that the experts themselves are oblivious to that effect (the more a-cultural the test the stronger the Flynnt effect).
Ong wants us to glimpse into what our consciousness was before writing, to feel it if not to adopt it, and to understand how transformative that emergence must have been.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
- Books > History > Cultural History
- Books > Poetry, Drama & Criticism > History & Criticism
- Books > Reference > Language > Speech
- Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Social Sciences > Linguistics > Phonetics & Phonics
- Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Social Sciences > Linguistics > Sociolinguistics
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
