Walter J. Ong

Walter J. Ong (November 30, 1912 – August 12, 2003) was an educator, academic, priest, professor of English literature , cultural historian , linguist, and philosopher known for his phenomenological and personalist accounts of Renaissance literary and intellectual history, of the evolution of consciousness, of the thought of Gerard Manley Hopkins, of contemporary American Catholicism, and of contemporary culture more generally.

Ong's most important work is Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason, which is a pioneering work not only in the field known today as print culture but also in the field known today as cultural studies. Ong elaborates the contrast between the visual and the oral that he found in Louis Lavelle's La parole et l'ecriture (Paris, 1942). In addition, Ong details how the spatialization and quantification of thought in dialectic and logic during the Middle Ages enabled "a new state of mind" to emerge in print culture, as he himself puts it in The Barbarian Within (72) -- a state of mind representing "a real mathematical transformation of thinking" (ibid.) associated with the emergence of modern science.

The companion volume, Ramus and Talon Inventory is a notable work that is a rudimentary contribution to the field known today as book history, because Ong briefly describes more than 750 volumes (mostly in Latin) that he had tracked down in more than 100 libraries in the British Isles and Continental Europe.

Ong's second most important work is The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History, which is also pioneering work both in the field known today as cultural studies and in the field known today as media ecology. his thesis in this book, he explains elsewhere, "is sweeping, but it is not reductionist, as reviewers and commentators, so far as I know, have all generously recognized: [my] works do not maintain that the evolution from primary orality through writing and print to an electronic culture, which produces secondary orality, causes or explains everything in human culture and consciousness. Rather, [my] thesis is relationist: major developments, and very likely even all major developments, in culture and consciousness are related, often in unexpected intimacy, to the evolution of the word from primary orality to its present state. But the relationships are varied and complex, with cause and effect often difficult to distinguish" (Interfaces of the Word 9-10).

Ong develops this thesis not only in The Presence of the Word and Interfaces of the Word but also in Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology and Orality and Literacy and in numerous articles.

His most widely known work, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, reviews the transit from an oral culture to a written culture, that is to the use of the technologies of written words for communication. Writing is described as a technology that must be laboriously learned, and which effects the first transformation of human thought from the world of simply sound to the world of sight. This transition has implications for structuralism, deconstruction, speech-act and reader-response theory, the teaching of reading and writing skills to males and to women, social studies, biblical studies, philosophy, and cultural history generally.

Ong's article "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction" is frequently cited in a wide range of works (see An Ong Reader 405-27), and his article "Literacy and Orality in Our Times" has been reprinted frequently (see An Ong Reader 465-78).

Ong also repeatedly writes about religious themes in a variety of articles and books -- from Frontiers in American Catholicism (1957) and American Catholic Crossroads (1959) to The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (1967) to Hopkins, the Self, and God (1986) to Faith and Contexts (4 vols. 1992-1999). He is especially fond of contrasting the cyclic patterns of thought in indigenous religious traditions and in Plato with the linear pattern of thought in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, which he likes to style as evolutionary thought.

See also: secondary orality.

Born to a Protestant father and a Roman Catholic mother in Kansas City, Missouri, Walter Jackson Ong, Jr., was raised as a Roman Catholic. In 1933 he received a bachelor of arts degree from Latin at Rockhurst College. He worked in printing and publishing prior entering the Society of Jesus in 1935. He was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1946. Ong earned a master's degree in English at Saint Louis University. His thesis on sprung rhythm in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (see An Ong Reader 111-74) was supervised by the young Canadian Marshall McLuhan, who was working at that time on his Cambridge University dissertation on Thomas Nashe and the verbal arts. Ong earned a licentiate in philosophy and a licentiate in sacred theology from Saint Louis University. After earning his doctorate degree in English at Harvard University in 1955, Ong returned to Saint Louis University, where he would teach for the next 30 years. In 1963 the French government honored Ong for his work on the French logician and educational reformer Peter Ramus (1515-1572) by dubbing Ong a knight, Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Academique. In 1966-1967 Ong served on the 14-member White House Task Force on Education that reported to President Lyndon Johnson. In 1971 Ong was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In April and May of 1974, he served as Lincoln Lecturer, presenting lectures in French in Cameroun, Zaire, and Senegal and in English in Nigeria. In 1978 Ong served as elected president of the 30,000-member Modern Language Association of America.

Contents

1 Publications 1.1 Lectures 1.2 Books 2 External links

Publications

Lectures

• 1985 Wolfson College Lectures at Oxford University, Opening Lecture, "Writing Is a Technology That Transforms Thought." In The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, ed. Gerd Baumann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).
• The Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto, Hopkins, the Self and God (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1986).
• The Terry Lectures at Yale University, The Presence of the Word (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967) Other Terry lecturers have included John Dewey, Erich Fromm, Charles Hartshorne, Carl Gustaf Jung, Jacques Maritain, George Gaylord Simpson, and Paul Tillich.
• The Cornell University Messenger Lectures on the Evolution of Civilization, Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1981)

Books

• Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Routledge, 1982) has been translated into 12 languages.
• An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton P, 2002).
• Faith and Contexts, 4 vols. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. (Atlanta: Scholars P, 1992-1999).
• Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1971) was a Scholar's Library selection for the Modern Language Association Book Club.
• Interfaces of the Word (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1977).
• Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1958).
• Ramus and Talon Inventory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1958).
• The Barbarian Within" (New York: Macmillan, 1962).
• In the Human Grain (New York: Macmillan, 1967).
• Frontiers in American Catholicism (New York: Macmillan, 1957).
• American Catholic Crossroads (New york: Macmillan, 1959).

External links

• Walter J. Ong Project - digital archives Saint Louis University
• Remembering Walter Ong