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Time, Memory, and the Verbal Arts: Essays on the Thought of Walter Ong
Edited by Dennis L. Weeks and Jane Hoogestraat
Readers of Christianity and Literature will appreciate and gain greater insight into the mind and spirit of a consummate American scholar through this collection of essays. Those who are familiar with the sixty-year scholarly career of Father Ong and his service to C&L on its Editorial Advisory Board can trace the concepts central to his remarkable contribution in almost all disciplines-from English studies to the natural sciences. Those who have begun recently to explore "the world according to Onglish" will find this collection useful in pursuing Ong's analysis of historical changes in human consciousness and explication of the rapid development of knowledge and technology in its cultural context.
The eleven essays are organized into two sections: "The Historical and Continuing Relevance of Ong's Thought" and "Ongian Readings." Close attention to human history in the first section reveals the essayists' conversations about ancient times (e.g., John Miles Foley's "The Bard's Audience I Always More Than a Fiction") and recent theory (e.g., Jane Hoogestraat's "'Discoverers of Something New': Ong, Derrida, and Postcolonial Theory").
Perhaps more than anything else, this collection recognizes the gathering of a rapidly growing community of scholars keenly interested in applying Ong's seminal ideas about human communication and consciousness to diverse topics: Chaucer, Shakespeare, aesthetics, the etymology of humor, and religious sensibility, among others. These "Ongian reader" not only illuminate the complexity of Ong's work but also suggest new openings for further appropriation of it in various areas of study.
As discerning editors, Dennis L. Weeks and Hoogestraat have accommodated a diversity of interests in the essays, ranging, for example, from Werner H. Kelber, New Testament scholar from Rice University who earlier in his work applied Ong's insight about primary orality to the Gospel of Mark, to Julie Stone Peters from Columbia University, who considers Ong's work pivotal to understanding the bias and the blessing developed by the dominance of print culture. The following brief summaries of Kelber's and Peters' essays demonstrate the editors' intention.
The lead piece in Part I, Peters' "Orality, Literacy, and Print Revisited," sorts out the recent interest in orality and literacy for considering the complexities of the spoken word, the written word, and the technological word, the basic paradigm of language most often attributed to Ong's work. Beginning with Jacques Derrida's criticism of Claude Levi-Strauss and his notion of the written word as split off from the spoken word (implying that writing is superior), Peters articulates Derrida's position that the result of such a notion supports a Western ethnocentrism and a status quo that maintains the power of the dominant group. While Peters admires the insights brought to the discussion of literacy by Derrida's analysis, she also detects unanswered questions concerning Derrida's own assertion that "writing in the colloquial sense" still privileges writing even as it attempts to broaden the power of non-dominant groups (28).
In the process of tracing the history of scholarly research done by A.R. Luria, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukacs, the Frankfurt school, and others, Peters firmly situates Ong by making clear his chosen direction for research. She writes:
Ong did not confine his explorations, however, to Western culture: his work intersected with Derrida's assertion that the roles Western institutions played in ignoring the use of language in African and Eastern cultures could produce the dominant power group. Peters points out that Ong has participated fully in this conversation among scholars and has offered some of the best knowledge to date about this significant turn in language studies.
Providing the opening essay in Part II, Kelber argues in "Incarnations, Remembrances, and has offered some of the best knowledge to date about this significant turn in language studies.
Providing the opening essay in Part II, Kelber argues in "Incarnations, Remembrances, and Transformations of the Word," that "Words are fundamentally spoken words, living in the evanescent actuality of sound, and shifts from sound to silence, and from temporality to spatiality, bring about alienation and complexification of human thought" (111). He then explores the implications of this thesis for the study of human communication in ancient and medieval times, especially in religious contexts.
Kelber begins with the Sophists and Plato's mistrust of them in fifth-century Greece, explaining the ambivalence these rhetoricians felt toward the relationship and usefulness of both speech and writing. The practice of rhetoric was rooted in the religious sensibilities of the time; both Gorgias and Plato understood the primary purpose of language to affect and to instruct the soul.
Augustine, fully trained and skilled in rhetoric, discovered in his study of the Greek experience the complexities of language and the religious underpinnings of the soul, two powerful concepts framing Christian thought. In addition, Augustine was mindful of the apostle Paul and his reliance on persuasion to spread the Christian message in very concrete and pragmatic terms. The controversy around the value of rhetoric and, at the same time, the seductive nature of rhetoric were evident throughout the history of church practice and views of biblical verities. In the rest of his essays, Kelber takes readers through the medieval period up to the Reformation, showing at each juncture a new invention of communication transforming the old and earlier invention (e.g., writing did not replace speaking; rather, speaking was both enriched and set aside by the new technology).
Both Peters' and Kelber's essays celebrate and analyze Ong's ability to mark and explain these junctures. In their summary of the significance of Ong's work, the editors of the collection assert: "Ong points out the present universe, with all its digital communications revolutions, other changes, and its persistent mysteries, is still, for persons of faith, just as much God's world and the subject of God's concern and love as it has always been" (22). For this reviewer the appropriate closing remark to this enlightening group of essays is "Amen"-to Ong's generous contribution to scholarly research and to the essayists who provide the best exegesis so far of the interface between thought and faith.
The eleven essays are organized into two sections: "The Historical and Continuing Relevance of Ong's Thought" and "Ongian Readings." Close attention to human history in the first section reveals the essayists' conversations about ancient times (e.g., John Miles Foley's "The Bard's Audience I Always More Than a Fiction") and recent theory (e.g., Jane Hoogestraat's "'Discoverers of Something New': Ong, Derrida, and Postcolonial Theory").
Perhaps more than anything else, this collection recognizes the gathering of a rapidly growing community of scholars keenly interested in applying Ong's seminal ideas about human communication and consciousness to diverse topics: Chaucer, Shakespeare, aesthetics, the etymology of humor, and religious sensibility, among others. These "Ongian reader" not only illuminate the complexity of Ong's work but also suggest new openings for further appropriation of it in various areas of study.
As discerning editors, Dennis L. Weeks and Hoogestraat have accommodated a diversity of interests in the essays, ranging, for example, from Werner H. Kelber, New Testament scholar from Rice University who earlier in his work applied Ong's insight about primary orality to the Gospel of Mark, to Julie Stone Peters from Columbia University, who considers Ong's work pivotal to understanding the bias and the blessing developed by the dominance of print culture. The following brief summaries of Kelber's and Peters' essays demonstrate the editors' intention.
The lead piece in Part I, Peters' "Orality, Literacy, and Print Revisited," sorts out the recent interest in orality and literacy for considering the complexities of the spoken word, the written word, and the technological word, the basic paradigm of language most often attributed to Ong's work. Beginning with Jacques Derrida's criticism of Claude Levi-Strauss and his notion of the written word as split off from the spoken word (implying that writing is superior), Peters articulates Derrida's position that the result of such a notion supports a Western ethnocentrism and a status quo that maintains the power of the dominant group. While Peters admires the insights brought to the discussion of literacy by Derrida's analysis, she also detects unanswered questions concerning Derrida's own assertion that "writing in the colloquial sense" still privileges writing even as it attempts to broaden the power of non-dominant groups (28).
In the process of tracing the history of scholarly research done by A.R. Luria, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukacs, the Frankfurt school, and others, Peters firmly situates Ong by making clear his chosen direction for research. She writes:
Ong did not confine his explorations, however, to Western culture: his work intersected with Derrida's assertion that the roles Western institutions played in ignoring the use of language in African and Eastern cultures could produce the dominant power group. Peters points out that Ong has participated fully in this conversation among scholars and has offered some of the best knowledge to date about this significant turn in language studies.
Providing the opening essay in Part II, Kelber argues in "Incarnations, Remembrances, and has offered some of the best knowledge to date about this significant turn in language studies.
Providing the opening essay in Part II, Kelber argues in "Incarnations, Remembrances, and Transformations of the Word," that "Words are fundamentally spoken words, living in the evanescent actuality of sound, and shifts from sound to silence, and from temporality to spatiality, bring about alienation and complexification of human thought" (111). He then explores the implications of this thesis for the study of human communication in ancient and medieval times, especially in religious contexts.
Kelber begins with the Sophists and Plato's mistrust of them in fifth-century Greece, explaining the ambivalence these rhetoricians felt toward the relationship and usefulness of both speech and writing. The practice of rhetoric was rooted in the religious sensibilities of the time; both Gorgias and Plato understood the primary purpose of language to affect and to instruct the soul.
Augustine, fully trained and skilled in rhetoric, discovered in his study of the Greek experience the complexities of language and the religious underpinnings of the soul, two powerful concepts framing Christian thought. In addition, Augustine was mindful of the apostle Paul and his reliance on persuasion to spread the Christian message in very concrete and pragmatic terms. The controversy around the value of rhetoric and, at the same time, the seductive nature of rhetoric were evident throughout the history of church practice and views of biblical verities. In the rest of his essays, Kelber takes readers through the medieval period up to the Reformation, showing at each juncture a new invention of communication transforming the old and earlier invention (e.g., writing did not replace speaking; rather, speaking was both enriched and set aside by the new technology).
Both Peters' and Kelber's essays celebrate and analyze Ong's ability to mark and explain these junctures. In their summary of the significance of Ong's work, the editors of the collection assert: "Ong points out the present universe, with all its digital communications revolutions, other changes, and its persistent mysteries, is still, for persons of faith, just as much God's world and the subject of God's concern and love as it has always been" (22). For this reviewer the appropriate closing remark to this enlightening group of essays is "Amen"-to Ong's generous contribution to scholarly research and to the essayists who provide the best exegesis so far of the interface between thought and faith.
Christianity and Literature, Vol. 51 #1 Autumn 2001 <Top>
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