- Hardcover: 256 pages
- Publisher: Routledge; annotated edition edition (25 Sep 2003)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0415281822
- ISBN-13: 978-0415281829
- Product Dimensions: 1.5 x 2.3 x 0.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Description
Product Description
Is it possible that changes in rhetorical practice could alter not just how thought is expressed, but also how it is made? Through a close stylistic and rhetorical analysis of contemporary feminist writing - from the cultural theory of Judith Butler to the popular journalism of Naomi Wolf and Germaine Greer - Lynne Pearce demonstrates how feminist thought is created as well as communicated through the frameworks in which it is presented. By linking rhetorical innovation with feminist epistemology in such a direct way, this is a book that will be of immense methodological as well as theoretical interest to readers, providing valuable insight into the often mysterious processes of conception and composition.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Few books change your understanding of the world and the way communication works. This one does!
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
"Orality and Literacy" explains & compares two dominant culture forms in the world today. As a reader or literate I never considered the differences inherent in a primarily oral world. This book explains them. What a wonderful new way to see things.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
11 reviews
28 of 32 people found the following review helpful
fascinating, but a slow read.
30 Jan 2001
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
"Orality and Literacy" is a scholarly work, which is the author's intent. Because of this, it requires a college level reading ability. With those warnings in mind, it is also a fascinating book on a somewhat remote subject: the way that our ability to write has changed our ways of thinking about ourselves and the world, our ways of remembering, and the progress of human development. It is a good introduction to this academic area as the author surveys the existing research and catalogs his sources very thoroughly. He gives particular attention to how oral cultures deal with thinking, remembering, and relating to the community in fundamentally different ways than literate cultures do. As a teacher, I found myself wondering if we could learn from oral cultures some of the old ways of relating to and remembering what we hear. Our literacy has allowed us to abandon these narrative and remembering techniques- to our impoverishment, I suspect.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Excellent book - fascinating content with clear form
23 Jan 2000
Format:Paperback
I recently became interested in media in their own right. I tried reading McLuhan, but found him to be dazzling and frustrating - he would drop these little sound bites and then move on. I wanted a more in depth exploration of media.
McLuhan brought to my attention how media are not just passive carriers of content, but powerfully shape and influence it. Even more startling, he stated that media shape consciousness itself - they change the very people who use it. The tail wags the dog.
McLuhan's probes have their strength in galvanizing thought, not in the patient, careful arguing of a point. It's in this context I found Ong exactly what I was hoping/looking for. He tries to evoke an understanding of what is what like to live in a culture that had never known writing. He discusses how this affects each aspect of life, how it structures personality and identity, community, etc. (Not surprisingly, Ong was a student of McLuhan.)Then he discusses the shift to literacy, and how it affected identity as well.
I am used to academics writing in such a dense, convoluted style. Happily, this was completely absent from Ong's style. He manages to drop little insights about without belaboring them.
The great thing about a book like this for me - a layman - is that he manages to comment on apparently trivial, mundane features of daily life like calendars, lists, clocks, title pages in books - and show how they really manifest these huge, typically invisible trends in the changing of how we think about life and ourselves.
I loved this book - I will certainly read his earlier articles, since Orality and Literacy is mostly a summing of all prior research (as of 1982).
I just finished it - but the weaknesses I felt were that toward the end, as he tries to discuss print (not just writing) specifically, it becomes a bit harder to follow, since much erudition is presumed at this point. It seemed less thought out, less imaginative here than the start and middle of the book. He himself states his treatment of print will be comparatively cursory, though.
I also wanted more concrete anthropological examples, since ultimately all discussion needs to be grounded in actual case studies of how oral cultures were affected by literacy. But this was not quite the slant Ong book. It isn't supposed to be social science, although it does incorporate some field research. (He's whetted my appetite for it - this is where I will turn next.)
Media studies like Ong, Havelock, McLuhan help to provide a fresh take on what so much literary criticism and philosphical postmodernism obscures and confuses over - the idea of the 'self.' A great book.
Ong doesn't pretend to have the last word on this topic. But it is a thought provoking, straightforward discussion of ideas that tend to be very abstract, remote, and certainly not mainstream. It added insight into an area I thought I knew very well.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
orality and literacy
4 April 2011
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This book is extremely helpful in analyzing a field of study that rarely sees the light of day. Perhaps one reason for this is the complexity of the subject matter. However, the author is adroit in presenting all aspects of the topic so that we are able to at understand more clearly what is intrinsic to the topic. I would recommend this book to both the scholar and the beginner alike, but it requires patience and rereading to make headway in what is a fascinating subject.
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