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.

The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (The Terry Lectures Series)

Reference

Ong, Walter J.

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Yale University Press

'Professor Ong has managed to synthesize an incredible amount of thought and at the same time has carried some of his earlier ideas still further. Orality and Literacy should become a classic. It is eminently assignable for undergraduate courses' - Professor John Ahern 'No comparable work on this important subject exists. Thanks to the lucidity of its style and presentation of complex thought, this is a work that will be accessible and useful...it will be the standard introduction to this topic for some years to come' - Choice 'Professor Walter Ong's new book explores some of the profound changes in our thought processes, personality and social structures which are the result, at various stages of our history, of the development of speech, writing and print. And he projects his analysis further into the age of mass electronic communications media...the cumulative impact of the book is dazzling. Read this book. Literature will never be the same again. And neither will you' - Robert Giddings, Tribune 'This admirably lucid book...has obvious implications for philosophy, literature, linguistics, sociology, psychology, education, and Biblical studies...I believe this is the best book Ong has published' - Thomas J. Farrell, Cross Currents

Orality and Literacy (New Accents)

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Routledge

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.

Orality and Literacy (New Accents) (Volume 18)

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: 30th Anniversary Edition (New Accents)

Analyzes the differences in consciousness between oral and literate societies and points out the intellectual, literary, and social effects of writing

Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New Accents)

Routledge& Kegan Paul

Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word [paperback] Ong, Walter J. [Jan 01, 1982] ...

METHUEN

Ramus and Talon Inventory: A Short-Title Inventory of the Published Works of Peter Ramus (1515–1572) and of Omer Talon (ca. 1510–1562) in Their Original and in Their Variously Altered Forms

Harvard University Press

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.

Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture

Cornell University Press

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.

Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture

Computers & Technology

Computer Science

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ong, Walter J.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Ong, Walter J.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ong, Walter J.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (The Terry Lectures Series)

Orality and Literacy (New Accents)

Orality and Literacy (New Accents) (Volume 18)

Orality and Literacy (New Accents)

Orality and Literacy: 30th Anniversary Edition (New Accents)

Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New Accents)

Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New Accents)

Ramus and Talon Inventory: A Short-Title Inventory of the Published Works of Peter Ramus (1515–1572) and of Omer Talon (ca. 1510–1562) in Their Original and in Their Variously Altered Forms

Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture

Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture