Walter Ong, orality and literacy

Résumé du document

Walter Wong's Orality and Literacy provides the reader, who by definition is a member of the literate world, with insights into the rich oral cultures that spawned the chirographic (writing) and the typographic (print) cultures that followed. In a world steeped in literacy for many centuries, interiorizing such insights is not an easy task. This may explain why many scholars, and some still today, work in a field of study known as "Oral literature": a "monstrous concept" and a "preposterous term" in Ong's opinion. Such an apparent oxymoron helps to point out how difficult it is for literates to grasp purely oral thought processes. Most human development according to Ong have been affected at great depth by the shift from orality to literacy.

Extraits

[...] Ong compares Plato's reservations to the reservations some people had against computers at the time Ong wrote Orality and Literacy (1982) and many have today about the Internet. However, Ong explains that although Plato described writing as a “mechanical, inhuman way of processing knowledge”, the fact he did not include poets the symbol of Homeric orality in his Republic shows where his true allegiance lied in this ancient clash of cultures between orality and literacy. Ong asserts that because writing had only been introduced into Greek civilizations a couple of centuries earlier, Plato saw it as a technology just as modern societies now deem printing and computers to be. [...]

[...] Writing, he goes on, provides the alienation from our natural milieu which is essential to fully understand life. But to understand writing Ong says we must understand it in relation to its past, to orality. Although Ong focuses mainly on oral culture and the changes brought upon it by writing, he also examines some of the impacts of print. One of these is the sense of closure it brings to people. “Manuscripts deliberately created texts out of other texts, it borrowing, adapting, sharing the common, originally oral, formulas and themes, even though it worked them up into forms impossible without writing. [...]

[...] ) Oral communication unites people in groups. Writing and reading are solitary activities that throw the psyche back on itself. Ong further insists on this aspect when he says that “sustained thought is tied to communication How else in a world where nothing can be committed to text could complex solutions to difficult problems ever be retrieved? But once a listener could be found, a suitable format, usually the narrative, was needed to convey the information. Such a need to rely on others fostered great value on communal memory and on the elders who villages and tribes relied upon to recall their own history. [...]

[...] To help recall such long lists of names orality had to rely on mnemonic devices and formulas such as Homer's hexameterized phrases. In Homeric poems, each character had epithets that both described their traits and helped the author fit them neatly into the meter. This explains why Odysseus is described 72 times as clever. This also explains why in oral tradition, the oak will always be described as sturdy and the princess as beautiful or sad. Because oral culture relies on the constant repetition of devices such as aphorisms, sayings and word associations, for it to be transmitted through generations, oral cultures tended to be very conservative and more comfortable with the statu quo. [...]

[...] Most human development according to Ong have been affected at great depth by the shift from orality to literacy. Moreover, adds Ong, because human consciousness needs writing to achieve its fuller potentials, “orality was destined to produce writing and in its wake not only the development of science but also of history, philosophy and of any art. However, since describing such encompassing changes cannot be addressed in a single book as the author more than once points out, Orality and Literacy focuses on the most fundamental ones: “Primary orality fosters personality structures that are more communal ( . [...]