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Review Summary: Thought provoking, Challenging, Insightful |
Date: 2008-05-22 |
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Details: Back when I was in college, one of my professors recommended this book to me. Ten years later, after skimming portions of it through several times, I read it through and discovered how important of a work it is. I would highly recommend it to anyone studying primary oral cultures and traditions.
Walter Ong approaches one of the central topics for developing a wholistic understanding of older mythic traditions-- the linguistic, semiotic, and cognative differences which separate oral and literate traditions.
The book begins by discussing the works dedicated to determining the origins of Homer's epics in the 20th century and the discovery of the extent to which the constraints of orally-transmitted knowledge structured the epics. Ong then summarizes additional research done in linguistic and anthropology fields relating to oral traditions in modern Europe, Africa, and elsewhere.
Ong succeeds in creating an accessible outline of the major transitions in human thought from orality to chirography (manuscripts), from chirography to typography (with the widespread use of the printing press), and the resurgence of some aspects of orality in modern electronic communication (both personal and mass-market).
This book is important for a number of reasons. First, it can help us to step back and be more conscious of how communications media are affecting how we communicate and, more importantly, how we think. Secondly it provides a framework for a better understanding of the older traditions in our past. Such understanding can provide a framework for better assimilating aspects of past approaches and thought processes into the present world.
Although published first in 1982, the work has been reprinted numerous times and is still in print. It is a classic in its field and I would highly recommend it. |
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Review Summary: Understand how writing changes everything |
Date: 2007-06-13 |
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Details: Delve into the history of human knowledge. Comprehend why oral cultures may be more pure than literate cultures. Writing down thoughts changes the way we think and look at the world.
Walter Ong express this and more in this easy to read, head slapping book. You will find yourself understanding everything you have ever read better. You will see knowledge and intelligence differently.
Your basic understanding of humanity will change for the better with Orality and Literacy. |
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Review Summary: Disappointing |
Date: 2007-06-09 |
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Details: This book is a simple summary of the works of other authors in the field of Orality and Literacy, with no proprietary originality whatsoever. I felt ONG often stated the obvious, such as the relation between books and death, as the content of books can be resuscitated after the author's death. Another such example is when for example one pronounces the word "orality", by the time he gets to "lity", "Ora" would have vanished....
What is quite strange is that a book about literacy, and one that devotes one third of its content to the invention of writing and the alphabet, there is no mention of the Phoenicians people in the index or anywhere in the book, (he talks about "some Semitic people"!!), though Phoenicians are known to have invented the alphabet (phonemic script as we know it today). "Not invented here" syndrome?
And although he admits that the invention of the alphabet is arguably the greatest mind transforming invention ever, he later conveys the argument that the addition of vowels to the alphabet by the Greeks was in itself far more important then the invention of the Semitic consonant alphabet, as -based on the work of another author - vowels "favor left hemisphere activity" and therefore allow for a higher level of abstraction (NLP?). Is it possible that ONG is unaware that the etymology of Semitic words are based almost always on three consonants stems, and that vowels in Semitic languages have a different function than in Greek?
In another passage, you get comments out of the blues with no connection to the core subject. In a paragraph discussing formulaic expressions used in oral cultures, you get undignified statements like "Khalil Gibran made a career of providing oral formulary products in print to literate Americans".
As to the Arab civilization, who by the end of the 10th century had produced over 10,000 titles in Arabic all catalogued in their "bibliotheca" (The Fahrast), - more than the work of all previous civilizations by that time- ONG claims that they have never really interiorized writing. To ONG, only the West apparently has fully interiorized writing, and this is what gives the West its "Westerness"... Maybe it's true...
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Review Summary: Brilliant |
Date: 2007-06-08 |
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Details: Brilliant book. I was introduced to these ideas at NYU by Jesse Bessinger about the time this book was written. I don't think it's fair of that other reviewer to take Ong to task for not addressing how computers might shape communication and thought when he was writing at the dawn of the PC era. Its relevance to the digital age is huge as it suggests different, nonlinear approaches to storytelling. This line of study sheds a unique light on the development of human culture that every literate person should know about. |
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Review Summary: Stop reading and listen to this! |
Date: 2006-12-25 |
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Details: 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. |
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out of 9 Reviews
