Literacy And Orality

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.

Walter J. Ong’s classic work provides a fascinating insight into the social effects of oral, written, printed and electronic technologies, and their impact on philosophical, theological, scientific and literary thought. This thirtieth anniversary edition – coinciding with Ong’s centenary year – reproduces his best-known and most influential book in full and brings it up to date with two new exploratory essays by cultural writer and critic John Hartley. Hartley provides: A scene-setting chapter that situates Ong’s work within the historical and disciplinary context of post-war Americanism and the rise of communication and media studies; A closing chapter that follows up Ong’s work on orality and literacy in relation to evolving media forms, with a discussion of recent criticisms of Ong’s approach, and an assessment of his concept of the ‘evolution of consciousness’; Extensive references to recent scholarship on orality, literacy and the study of knowledge technologies, tracing changes in how we know what we know. These illuminating essays contextualize Ong within recent intellectual history, and display his work’s continuing force in the ongoing study of the relationship between literature and the media, as well as that of psychology, education and sociological thought.

Orality and Literacy investigates the interactions of the oral and the literate through close studies of particular cultures at specific historical moments. Rejecting the 'great-divide' theory of orality and literacy as separate and opposite to one another, the contributors posit that whatever meanings the two concepts have are products of their ever-changing relationships to one another. Through topics as diverse as Aboriginal Canadian societies, Ukrainian-Canadian narratives, and communities in ancient Greece, Medieval Europe, and twentieth-century Asia, these cross-disciplinary essays reveal the powerful ways in which cultural assumptions, such as those about truth, disclosure, performance, privacy, and ethics, can affect a society's uses of and approaches to both the written and the oral. The fresh perspectives in Orality and Literacy reinvigorate the subject, illuminating complex interrelationships rather than relying on universal generalizations about how literacy and orality function.

Explores the role of written and oral communication in Greece.

An enlarged and updated edition of Ruth Finnegan's authoritative and fully evidenced classic.

This classic work explores the vast differences between oral and literate cultures and offers a brilliantly lucid account of the intellectual, literary and social effects of writing, print and electronic technology. The 3rd edition sees the addition of a short preface, further reading section, and essay-style afterword focusing on how orality and literacy has changed in relation to modern media, and how the idea of the 'evolution of consciousness' can be taken up anew in the light of recent work, from John Hartley.

The essays in Between Orality and Literacy address how oral and literature practices intersect as messages, texts, practices, and traditions move and change, because issues of orality and literacy are especially complex and significant when information is transmitted over wide expanses of time and space or adapted in new contexts. Their topics range from Homer and Hesiod to the New Testament and Gaius’ Institutes, from epic poetry and drama to vase painting, historiography, mythography, and the philosophical letter. Repeatedly they return to certain issues. Writing and orality are not mutually exclusive, and their interaction is not always in a single direction. Authors, whether they use writing or not, try to control the responses of a listening audience. A variable tradition can be fixed, not just by writing as a technology, but by such different processes as the establishment of a Panhellenic version of an Attic myth and a Hellenistic city’s creation of a single celebratory history.

A detailed examination of the relationship between orality and literacy includes the traditions upon which they are based and the functions which they serve as well as the psychological and linguistic processes that influence them.