Orality and Literacy Book

The book is from 1982, and so Ong's critique of written texts is based on its Modernist characteristics - the way it represents a closed singular voice: authoritative, and not just unresponsive to the reader, but unaware of a reader other than in the most abstract and removed sense. With the rise of the internet these characteristics give way to limitless intertextuality. The written text is opened up to a multiplicity of voices that can respond immediately to a written text, that remix, reconstitute, and subvert.

It's interesting that Ong criticizes written debate as lacking spontaneity, and discusses how electronic media - televison - has transmitted this limitation to contemporary oral debate too.

Electronic media do not tolerate a show of open antagonism. Despite their cultivated air of spontaneity, these media are totally dominated by a sense of closure which is the heritage of print: a show of hostility might break open the closure, the tight control . . . genteel, literate domesticity is rampant. Only quite elderly persons today can remember what oratory was like when it was still in living contact with its primary oral roots. (p. 135)

To which, in 2015, we say:



These aren't characteristics of written text, but of a particular context of mid-20th century textual production.

Similarly, when Ong rhapsodizes over oral language he completely overlooks the fact that the oral tradition explicitly shuts out some speakers. He describes how orality:

"...has generated a strong group sense, for listening to spoken words forms hearers into a group, a true audience, just as reading written or printed texts turns individuals in on themselves" (p. 134

But in truth, the oral tradition hinges on who is allowed to speak. Who has permission to address the group? And the audience has never been united - there were always those who crept into the shadowy corners, away from the speaker, hating themselves just a little more with each word. They just didn't have any right of reply.

Ong specifically discusses how the particular voice of the novel arose after women were admitted to vernacular schools; "practically oriented, for commerce and domestic affairs," and that women were less influenced by the "Latin-based, academic, rhetorical tradition." Yeah, less influenced, because they'd been shut out. The novel explicitly allowed women to hide their identity, and allow their words to speak for themselves for the first time.

Anyway, its a product of its time. There's a lot of good stuff, but its not a definitive text by any means. 3.5 stars rounding up.