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.

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.

Walter J. Ongs Standardwerk erweist sich vor dem Hintergrund des heutigen Wandels von Medien, Kultur und Gesellschaft als relevanter denn je: Es bietet in anschaulicher Weise Einblicke in den Charakter mundlicher und schriftlicher Gesellschaften und fuhrt damit vor Augen, welche zentrale Bedeutung der Transformation von Kommunikation fur die gesellschaftliche und kulturelle Entwicklung zukommt. Ong zeichnet nach, wie tiefgreifend unsere gesamte Kultur durch den UEbergang von der mundlichen zur schriftlichen und dann zur elektronischen Kommunikation, durch die Entwicklung des Schreibens und Druckens umgestaltet worden ist. Dieses Buch zeigt eindrucksvoll die unterschiedliche Bedeutung mundlicher und schriftlicher Kommunikationsweisen und hilft, die 'zweite Oralitat' einer digitalen Medienumgebung zu verstehen. Es beantwortet Fragen wie: welchen Stellenwert hat gesprochene Sprache in einer schriftbasierten Gesellschaft? Wie haben sich Kulturen durch immer leistungsfahigere Aufzeichnungstechniken verandert? Und in welchem Spannungsverhaltnis befinden sich Oralitat und Literalitat im elektronischen Zeitalter?

This is a new release of the original 1962 edition.

This collection of essays by Walter J. Ong focuses on the complex and dynamic relationship between verbal performance and cultural evolution. By studying the history of rhetoric and related arts from classical antiquity through the age of romanticism to the modern period, Ong both illuminates the past and helps explain late-twentieth-century modes of expression.

Elegantly written and wide ranging, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology traces the evolution of devices used to store, retrieve, and communicate knowledge. Ong discusses diverse topics including memory as art, associationist critical theory, the close relationship between romanticism and technology, and the popular culture of the 1970s. This book also contains essays about Tudor writings in English on rhetoric and literary theory, the study of Latin as a Renaissance puberty rite, Ramism in the classroom and in commerce, Jonathan Swift's notion of the mind, and John Stuart Mill's politics.

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Language in all its modes-oral, written, print, electronic-claims the central role in Walter J. Ong's acclaimed speculations on human culture. After his death, his archives were found to contain unpublished drafts of a final book manuscript that Ong envisioned as a distillation of his life's work. This first publication of Language as Hermeneutic, reconstructed from Ong's various drafts by Thomas D. Zlatic and Sara van den Berg, is more than a summation of his thinking. It develops new arguments around issues of cognition, interpretation, and language. Digitization, he writes, is inherent in all forms of "writing," from its early beginnings in clay tablets. As digitization increases in print and now electronic culture, there is a corresponding need to counter the fractioning of digitization with the unitive attempts of hermeneutics, particularly hermeneutics that are modeled on oral rather than written paradigms. In addition to the edited text of Language as Hermeneutic, this volume includes essays on the reconstruction of Ong's work and its significance within Ong's intellectual project, as well as a previously unpublished article by Ong, "Time, Digitization, and Dali's Memory," which further explores language's role in preserving and enhancing our humanity in the digital age.

Renaissance logician, philosopher, humanist, and teacher, Peter Ramus (1515-72) is best known for his attack on Aristotelian logic, his radical pedagogical theories, and his new interpretation for the canon of rhetoric. His work, published in Latin and translated into many languages, has influenced the study of Renaissance literature, rhetoric, education, logic, and--more recently--media studies.
Considered the most important work of Walter Ong's career, "Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue" is an elegant review of the history of Ramist scholarship and Ramus's quarrels with Aristotle. A key influence on Marshall McLuhan, with whom Ong enjoys the status of honorary guru among technophiles, this challenging study remains the most detailed account of Ramus's method ever published. Out of print for more than a decade, this book--with a new foreword by Adrian Johns--is a canonical text for enthusiasts of media, Renaissance literature, and intellectual history.

Language in all its modes-oral, written, print, electronic-claims the central role in Walter J. Ong's acclaimed speculations on human culture. After his death, his archives were found to contain unpublished drafts of a final book manuscript that Ong envisioned as a distillation of his life's work. This first publication of Language as Hermeneutic, reconstructed from Ong's various drafts by Thomas D. Zlatic and Sara van den Berg, is more than a summation of his thinking. It develops new arguments around issues of cognition, interpretation, and language. Digitization, he writes, is inherent in all forms of "writing," from its early beginnings in clay tablets. As digitization increases in print and now electronic culture, there is a corresponding need to counter the fractioning of digitization with the unitive attempts of hermeneutics, particularly hermeneutics that are modeled on oral rather than written paradigms. In addition to the edited text of Language as Hermeneutic, this volume includes essays on the reconstruction of Ong's work and its significance within Ong's intellectual project, as well as a previously unpublished article by Ong, "Time, Digitization, and Dali's Memory," which further explores language's role in preserving and enhancing our humanity in the digital age.

Drawing on a wide range of disciplines linguistics, phenomenological analysis, cultural anthropology, media studies, and intellectual history Walter J. Ong offers a reasoned and sophisticated view of human consciousness different in many respects from that of structuralism. The essays in Interfaces of the Word are grouped around the dialectically related themes of change or alienation and growth or integration. Among the subjects Ong covers are the origins of speech in mother tongues; the rise and final erosion of nonvernacular learned languages; and the fictionalizing of audiences that is enforced by writing. Other essays treat the idiom of African talking drums, the ways new media interface with the old, and the various connections between specific literary forms and shifts in media that register in the work of Shakespeare and Milton and in movements such as the New Criticism. Ong also discusses the paradoxically nonliterary character of the Bible and the concerted blurring of fiction and actuality that marked much drama and narrative toward the close of the twentieth century."

What accounts for the popularity of the macho image, the fanaticism of sports enthusiasts, and the perennial appeal of Don Quixote's ineffectual struggles? In Fighting for Life, Walter J. Ong addresses these and related questions, offering insight into the role of competition in human existence. Focusing on the ways in which human life is affected by contest, Ong argues that the male agonistic drive finds an outlet in games as divergent as football and chess.

Demonstrating the importance of contest in biological evolution and in the growth of consciousness out of the unconscious, Ong also shows how adversary procedure has affected social, linguistic, and intellectual history. He discusses shifting patterns of contest in such arenas as spectator sports, politics, business, academia, and religion. Human beings' internalization of agonistic drives, he concludes, can foster the deeper discovery of the self and of distinctively human freedom.

What accounts for the popularity of the macho image, the fanaticism of sports enthusiasts, and the perennial appeal of Don Quixote's ineffectual struggles? In Fighting for Life, Walter J. Ong addresses these and related questions, offering insight into the role of competition in human existence. Focusing on the ways in which human life is affected by contest, Ong argues that the male agonistic drive finds an outlet in games as divergent as football and chess.

Demonstrating the importance of contest in biological evolution and in the growth of consciousness out of the unconscious, Ong also shows how adversary procedure has affected social, linguistic, and intellectual history. He discusses shifting patterns of contest in such arenas as spectator sports, politics, business, academia, and religion. Human beings' internalization of agonistic drives, he concludes, can foster the deeper discovery of the self and of distinctively human freedom.

This provocative exploration of the nature and history of the word in some of its social, psychological, literary, phenomenological, and religious dimensions argues that the word is initially aural and in the last analysis always remains sound; it cannot be reduced to any other category. Father Ong contends that sound is essentially an event manifesting power and personal presence, and his descriptive analysis of the development of the media of verbal expression, from their oral sources through the laborious transfer to the visual world and then to contemporary means of electronic communication, shows that the predicament of the human word is the predicament of man himself. Examining the close alliance of the spoken word with the sense of the sacred, particularly in the Hebreo-Christian tradition, he reveals that in a world where presence has penetrated time and space as never before, modern man must find the God who has given himself in the Word which brings man more into the world of sound than of sight.

English summary: In this classic work of modern philosophy, Walter Ong examines the differences between the written and spoken word. From Antiquity to medieval Scholastics, African oral cultures to structuralism, Ong shows how the passage to writing leads to profound cognitive changes that go far beyond the simple transcription of an oral discourse on a physical surface. Ongs analysis is all the more pertinent as it brings electronic media, which was only just beginning when he was writing in the 1980s, into this essential discussion. French description: Cet ouvrage traite des differences entre oralite et ecriture; ou plutot, dans la mesure ou les lecteurs de ce livre ont par definition une connaissance intime de la culture ecrite, le sujet sera premierement la pensee et son expression verbale dans la culture orale, qui nous est inconnue et nous deroute parfois, et deuxiemement la pensee et l'expression ecrites envisagees sous l'angle de leur emergence de l'oralite et de leur relation a elle. Oralite et ecriture est le premier livre traduit en francais du jesuite et universitaire americain Walter J. Ong. Collegue et ami de Marshall McLuhan, qu'il n'est pas sans avoir influence, Walter Ong deploie dans cet ouvrage une erudition vertigineuse (de l'epopee grecque au structuralisme en passant par les scolastiques medievaux et les cultures orales africaines) afin de montrer en quoi l'apparition de l'ecriture - et celle de ses supports - induit des changements cognitifs profonds qui vont au-dela de la simple retranscription du discours oral sur une surface comme le papier ou l'ecran d'un ordinateur. Des tablettes sumeriennes aux premiers ordinateurs personnels, que Walter Ong decouvrit au debut des annees 1980 alors qu'il ecrivait Oralite et ecriture, cet ouvrage s'interesse egalement au contraste entre les medias electroniques et l'imprime qui prolonge celui, plus ancien, entre ecriture et oralite. L'epoque electronique est, pour Ong, une epoque de l' oralite secondaire: celle des telephones, de la radio, de la television - dont l'existence depend de l'ecriture et de l'imprime -, mais aussi, pourrait-on ajouter en ce debut de XXIe siecle, celle de l'Internet. Le passage de l'oralite a l'ecriture, puis au traitement electronique, implique des structures sociales, economiques, politiques ou religieuses differentes, que Walter Ong expose en detail dans ce livre classique, traduit en une douzaine de langues et desormais accessible au lectorat francophone.