Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture by Walter J. Ong, S.J. (review)

Abstract

INTERFACES OF THE WORD: STUDIES IN THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND CULTURE BY WALTER J. ONG, S.J. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1977. 352 pages with index.) This collection of eleven remarkably original and far-reaching essays by Father Ong, continues an important series of inquiries into the phenomenology of the spoken and written word and the implications for the evolution of modern consciousness. As in earlier works, the author poses uniquely profound questions about man's changing relationship to his verbal /cosmos as his culture's medium of communication modulates from a participatory oral "noetics" to manuscript writing and on to typographic print. In concert with Eric Havelock (Preface to Plato, 1963), Ong describes the world of oral communication as a collective enterprise which keeps knowledge present and accessible by storing it in mimetic patterns; the repetitive rhythms of narration structure man's Weltanschauung in oral culture and make his attitudes, beliefs, and customs available to him and his fellows. Where Ong goes most significantly beyond Havelock is especially in his analysis of succeeding stages in man's development of writing and consciousness. Literary ages from post-Homeric written culture to modern America are treated with a discerning and well-informed eye; what emerges is a clear and crucially important new perspective: to understand our literary artifacts, the author argues, we must understand the culture-bound processes involved in their creation and apprehension; we must grasp, in short, the phenomenological underpinnings of text-making and in particular the place of each work on the oral-to-typographic spectrum. In the second essay, "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction," for example, he illustrates how the writer/reader set-up calls for the donning of masks by both members of a supposed group of two which paradoxically never really forms. The modern process is thus patent fictionalization (p. 80). Broad-based, thoughtful commentary such as this contributes a great deal to a re-thinking of literary history, an ongoing project in modern criticism for which this book could well serve as a prolegomenon. JOHN MILES FOLEY* ?JOHN MILES FOLEY is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri in Columbia. His Ph.D. is from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He has written numerous articles and reviews, and in 1980 will publish East European Folklore as a special issue of Canadian-American Slavic Studies. 154VOL 34. NO 2 (SPRING 1980) ...

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