McLuhan alerted Ong about Miller's book. Miller had done his best to understand and explain Ramus' work. But toward the end of his book he called for somebody to undertake a far more thorough study of Ramus' work and its European context. In the late 1940s, after Ong had completed his theological studies and had been ordained a priest, he advanced with three graduate degrees in hand to HarvardUniversity to undertake doctoral studies in English. Perry Miller served as the director of Ong's ambitious doctoral dissertation about Ramus and Ramism.
With the financial assistance of two Guggenheim Fellowships, Ong lived abroad for about four years researching his dissertation. By virtue of being a Jesuit, he was entitled to request to live in Jesuit residences, which put him on touch with local Jesuits who knew the areas where they lived. He worked in more than 100 libraries in the British Isles and Continental Europe tracking down the more than 750 volumes he lists and briefly describes in Ramus and Talon Inventory (Harvard University Press, 1958), which he dedicates to Marshall McLuhan.
Its companion volume is Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press, 1958). In 2004, the year after Ong's death, the University of Chicago Press reissued it in a paperback edition with a new foreword by Adrian Johns. In this book Ong works with the contrast of oral-aural and visual, a contrast with which he also works in many of the essays reprinted in his collection The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Studies and Essays (Macmillan, 1962).
But those two big volumes about Ramus and Ramism put Ong on the intellectual map as a big-league thinker, because most Harvard professors had to acknowledge that they had not undertaken such a massively researched and intellectually ambitious study. In 1963, the French government dubbed Ong a knight, an honor rarely bestowed on someone who is not a French citizen.
I would characterize the next events in Ong's life as one
blessing after another after another after another after another . . . . You
get the idea.
As we now proceed to review significant events in Ong's lifetime, please remember that in the years of Ong's lifetime the United States was engaged in the Cold War, and Americans lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the black civil rights movement, the American imperialistic war in Vietnam, the women's movement, the Supreme Court's decision to legalize abortion, the fall of the Berlin wall, the break up of the old Soviet Union, the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, and the American imperialistic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are still ongoing.
During the 1960s and the 1970s and into the 1980s, Ong was very active on the academic lecture circuit both in the United States and abroad. Moreover, during the late 1960s and the 1970s, McLuhan was arguably the most publicized English teacher in the English-speaking world. (He died in 1980.)
In 1960, Harvard University Press published Albert B. Lord's book about oral tradition involving non-literate performers, The Singer of Tales.
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