Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word
| Author | Walter J. Ong |
|---|---|
| Published | 1982 |
| Format | Book |
TL;DR — Walter Ong’s 1982 classic on how writing and print changed human thought, contrasting oral cultures with literate ones and extending the analysis to electronic media.
Routledge’s New Accents series; first published by Methuen in 1982, this is the 2002 reprint. Ong, a Jesuit and professor at Saint Louis University, synthesises research from Milman Parry and Albert Lord on Homer to Eric Havelock and Jack Goody.
He sets out the “psychodynamics of orality” — oral thought as additive, aggregative, redundant, conservative, agonistic and situational — and argues that writing restructures consciousness, that print pushed that further, and that electronic media produce a “secondary orality.” Later chapters treat memory, narrative and plot, and what orality-literacy studies mean for literary theory.
What it is: a classic of media theory and the history of communication. In copyright (a libgen copy).
Where this came from
- A copy saved in October 2026.
214 pages. A PDF copy is held in Kyle’s private archive; it is not linked or shared here.