Oddly enough, Ong's mature work from the early 1950s onwards is like praise poetry in spirit, but in prose of course. Examples of the jeremiad spirit can be found in certain of his earlier works. But he seems to have worked the jeremiad spirit out of his system and then switched to expressing the spirit of praise and celebration.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
In addition to publishing novels and short stories, Virginia Woolf published essays and book reviews. In today's parlance, she could be referred to as a public intellectual in England, alongside other prolific public intellectuals there such as G. K. Chesterton. Like Cardinal John Henry Newman, Chesterton famously converted to Roman Catholicism, and so did McLuhan after he had completed his studies at Cambridge University.
Like her father, Virginia Woolf was an atheist in the sense that she did not believe in a personal God, as did orthodox Christians such as T. S. Eliot and G. K. Chesterton and Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong. However, she evidently did believe that there is a world soul. In the orbit of orthodox Christianity, the idea of a world soul is akin to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's cosmic Christ. Of course the supposed cosmic Christ involves the personification of Christ.
In the early 1930s, the young Canadian Protestant Marshall McLuhan, equipped with an undergraduate degree and a Master's degree from a university in Canada, studied at Cambridge University in England under F. R. Leavis and I. A. Richards in the then-emerging field of English literary studies.
But F. R. Leavis and his wife Queenie Leavis were not exactly impressed with Virginia Woolf's writings -- either her fiction or her non-fiction. Not surprisingly, Virginia Woolf was not herself impressed with the young critics whose works were published in the journal SCRUTINIES, edited by F. R. Leavis and Queenie Leavis.
However, the approach to literary criticism that F. R. Leavis and I. A. Richards favored became known as the New Criticism. But there was no explicitly designated "old criticism" over against which the so-called New Criticism fashioned itself.
But Virginia Woolf and G. K. Chesterton, for example, practiced literary criticism, as did others such as T. S. Eliot and E. M. Forster.
But the then-emerging field of English studies got caught up in the then-emerging academic revolution that Christopher Jencks and David Riesman detail in their book THE ACADEMIC REVOLUTION (1968).
As a result of the large cultural juggernaut of forces at work in the so-called academic revolution, the so-called New Criticism eventually came to dominate English literary studies after World War II -- down to the time of my undergraduate education (1962-1966) and a bit beyond that time. I do not recall hearing about or reading about Virginia Woolf before the 1970s.
After McLuhan converted to Roman Catholicism in the spring of 1937, he helped bring the approach to English literary studies pioneered by Leavis and Richards to St. Louis University, the Jesuit university in St. Louis, Missouri. McLuhan taught English there from 1937 to 1944, with a leave of absence in 1939-1940 during which he returned to Cambridge University to continue his work on his doctoral dissertation (completed in 1943).
As part of Ong's Jesuit training, he did his graduate studies in English and in philosophy at St. Louis University in the late 1930s and early 1940s, where he took English courses from McLuhan, as did young Maurice B. McNamee, S.J.
After Ong and McNamee had each been ordained a Jesuit priest and had completed his Jesuit training, each returned to teach English at St. Louis University for decades. Each of them taught upper-division English courses title Practical Criticism in honor of Richards' book titled PRACTICAL CRITICISM -- part of McLuhan's enduring legacy at St. Louis University.
See McNamee's 500-page memoir, RECOLLECTIONS IN TRANQUILLITY (2001).
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