Sunday, May 29, 2016

Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong


This is a book everyone should read in college and again in their mid-career. Every page is a revelation. These are ideas your mind has danced around or glimpsed sight of but not really grasped. There was an oral world before writing and we can see vestiges of it and have been shaped by it, but cannot really understand it completely because the very way we think and encounter the world has been changed by writing. Then print came and changed us and now electronic communication is changing everything again.

Ong is a master of explanation and uses a rich exciting vocabulary. He touches so many subjects like literary criticism and linguistics it is dizzying. If you want to read a serious non-fiction classic you will think about from now on, read this book. In the closing paragraph he briefly mentions the Christian Logos, Christ, an oral messenger of a Christianity based on a written text.

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