Orality and literacy 25 years later

Communication Research Trends, Dec, 2007 by Paul A. Soukup

So far, then, Orality and Literacy introduces its twin concepts of spoken expression and written expression, paying close attention to the research that reports discoveries about their nature and consequences. In Chapters 6 and 7, Ong stays closer to his roots in literary studies and the history of rhetoric in order to better demonstrate the impact of this kind of study. Chapter 6 addresses narrative, story line, and characters as they appear in oral expression and in written texts. As authors internalize writing, Western literature (the object of Ong's study) shows a shift in narrative structure as well as a change in the kinds of characters that inhabit that narrative. These shifts, he notes, correlate as well with the different sensitivities of hearer or reader.

Ong concludes the book with what he terms "some theorems" in Chapter 7. They are "more or less hypothetical statements that connect in various ways with what has already been explained here about orality and the orality-literacy shift" (p. 156). In these theorems Ong shows the relevance and promise of examining media shifts by engaging key elements of literary theory: literary history, New Criticism, Formalism, structuralism, deconstruction, speech-act theory, and reader-response theory. In each instance he makes claims as to how the historical and psychological understanding of oral cultures (and writing cultures) challenges basic assumptions of each theory. In turn, he invites students of each area to more fully engage the orality-literacy discoveries. He closes by moving the discussion in an interdisciplinary way. Any discipline that engages texts needs to know more about the nature of texts; any discipline that has an historical consciousness needs to know how even the very conceptualization of a "text" changes over time. Here, he invites philosophers, Biblical scholars, and social scientists in particular to re-visit long-held conclusions. Finally, in a forward-thinking expansion consistent with the New Accents series, he opens the door to a consideration of the media. While resisting a transportation model of communication, he stresses communication's human dimension and--true to his discussion of the impact of writing--notes that the transport model shows the impact of writing, since writing cultures "regard speech as more specifically informational than do oral cultures where speech is more performance-oriented, more a way of doing something to someone" (p. 177).

B. The Book's Reception

Reviewers, particularly those associated with rhetorical or communication studies, generally received Orality and Literacy quite favorably, recognizing its scope and noting that it provides a solid introduction to the areas under study. Some reviewers noted limitations and others felt that Ong's division between oral cultures and literate ones proved too stark.

Lippert (1982) sees the book as "an unprecedented work of synthesis" that "weaves a tremendous amount of material into a single compact thesis" (p. 401). Predicting that the book will become a "landmark" (p. 402) for cultural and communication studies, he highlights its method, particularly in focusing the examination on the interface between cultures, as occurred in the culture of classical antiquity or the medieval period when oral cultures (the culture of the great mass of people) more clearly interacted with the chirographic ones of the educated elites.