Walter J. Ong for the 21st Century: Pedagogy, Practice, Technology and Ong

Session C
Session Coordinator: Deborah M. Scaggs
Saint Louis University

Walter Ong and Secondary Orality: Interpreting the Electronic Paradigm

This paper presents an argument for using Ong’s work on orality and literacy to theorize the emerging electronic paradigm which he called “secondary orality”  and which I call “electronicity.” As the internet, film, television, and computer games inspire new genres of narrative, a need has developed for a narrative theory that embraces new media. Ong’s ideas provide such a theory for narrative studies and literary criticism. Unlike virtually all literary theory that has governed narrative discourse in the past century—psychoanalysis, Marxism, New Criticism, Formalism, structuralism, post structuralism, and feminism, among others—Ong’s account of the relationship between human cognition and narrative incorporates the development of electronic and computer-mediated arts as an important and positive step in the evolution of the human intellect. I will focus this paper on electronicity by applying Ong’s narrative theory to fan texts—fiction and music vids—which are vigorously emerging genres on the internet. I will demonstrate that Ong’s connection of electronic media to the characteristics of primary orality offers an encouraging and coherent method of incorporating new media into the evolution of narrative from primary orality, to literacy, to electronicity.

Sharon Cumberland, Ph.D.
Seattle University
slc@seattleu.edu

The Walter J. Ong Archive: A Preliminary Report

John Walter
Saint Louis University

The Paradox of “Oral Residue”

Walter Ong’s rich, varied studies of orality and literacy have generated many scholarly and critical controversies in the “orality/literacy wars”. Some readers claim, for example, that he privileges oral language and culture over the written, or that he sponsors an absolute separation between oral and chirographic/typographic modes of discourse—a sort of “great divide” theory. Other myriad hermeneutic “takes” on his work explore only an aspect of a complex concept—caught in the title of his most famous book, Orality and Literacy, for example—such as: “Some psychodynamics of orality”; or “Writing restructures consciousness”; or “Print, space, and closure,” thus compromising its integrity and complexity. What eludes many readers, perhaps those who have read only Ong’s Orality and Literacy or one or two of his articles, is an understanding of “oral residue,” which he defined precisely in his classic article, “Oral Residue in Tudor Prose Style.” This concept not only helps to account for his “complications and overlappings” among the oral, chirographical, typographical, and electronic transformations of the word, but also underscores the paradox of post-chirographic orality or oralism. Ong’s delineation of this paradox—in his studies of Ramus and Talon, and in The Barbarian Within ; The Presence of the Word; Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology; Interfaces of the Word; and Hopkins, the Self, and God—underlies his hermeneutics of orality and literacy.

Thomas M. Walsh
Saint Louis University
Walshtm@slu.edu

Walter J. Ong: The Archival Record

Few scholars exert such a strong influence on so many disciplines as did Walter Ong. Fr. Ong spent most of his lengthy and prodigious career at Saint Louis University, and he kept an extensive record of his work there. Following Fr. Ong's death, this valuable resource has been donated to the Saint Louis University Archives with the intent that it be made available to researchers. This presentation will serve as a scope and content report of the collection to guide future researchers.

Robert Blaskiewicz
Saint Louis University
rblaskie@slu.edu