Now, for Ong, my favorite scholar, mentioned above, movies with soundtracks are part of what he famously refers to as our contemporary secondary oral culture (i.e., the oral culture advanced by the communications media that accentuated sound (television, telephones, radio, tape-recording devices, movies with soundtracks, and the like). For Ong, the communications media that accentuate sound reached a critical mass of cultural predominance around 1960.
Ong famously differentiates our contemporary secondary oral culture from the historic primary oral culture of oral-aural communication that predominated before phonetic alphabetic literacy emerged in ancient Hebrew culture and in ancient Greek culture.
For discussion of phonetic alphabetic writing and ancient Hebrew culture, see my article "Walter Ong and Harold Bloom Can Help Us Understand the Hebrew Bible" in Explorations in Media Ecology, volume 11, numbers 3&4 (2012): pp. 255-272.
But what the Jewish biblical scholar James L. Kugel refers to as the great shift in his 2017 book The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) can be interpreted as exemplifying what Ong refers to as the aural-to-visual shift in his 1958 massively researched book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, mentioned above.
For discussion of the historical Jesus and his oral-aural teaching, see my article "Walter J. Ong's Bold Thought and John Dominic Crossan's Timid View of the Historical Jesus" in the online journal New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication, volume 2, number 2 (2022):
But also see the Luther New Testament scholar Werner H. Kelber's 1983 book The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q (Fortress Press).
For discussion of oral tradition and the emergence of phonetic alphabetic literacy in ancient Greek culture, see the classicist Eric A. Havelock's landmark book Preface to Plato (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963). In it, Havelock refers to the Homeric mentality, which involves imagistic thinking, and the Platonic mentality, which involves more abstract thinking.
For all practical purposes, what Havelock refers to as the Homeric mentality is the equivalent of what Ong refers to as orally based thought and expression in his 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Methuen; pp. 36-57).
Now, in 2020, W. W. Norton and company, in collaboration with the foundation of the Works of C. G. Jung, published the seven-volume set of Jung's Black Books: 1913-1932: Notebooks of Transformation, edited by Sonu Shamdasani; translated by Martin Liebscher, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani.
The prolific Swiss psychiatrist and psychological theorist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) experienced an extraordinary mid-life crisis. Jung's Black Books: 1913-1932 are the extraordinary record he made of his extraordinary mid-life crisis.
In volume 1, Sonu Shamdasani provides an introduction titled "Toward a Visionary Science: Jung's Notebooks of Transformation" (pp. 11-120).
In Sonu Shamdasani's subsection titled "The Intoxication of Mythology" (pp.13-15), he says, "In Transformations and Symbols of the Libido [1912], Jung differentiated two kinds of thinking. Taking his cue from William James, among others, he contrasted directed thinking and fantasy thinking. The former was verbal and logical. The latter was passive, associative, and imagistic. The former was exemplified by science and the latter by mythology. Jung claimed that the ancients [before the influence of phonetic alphabetic literacy] lacked the capacity for directed thinking, which was a modern acquisition. Fantasy thinking took place when directed thinking ceased. Transformation and Symbols of the Libido [1912] was an extended study of fantasy thinking, and of the continued presence of mythological themes in the dreams and fantasies of contemporary individuals" (p. 14).
The present essay is deliberately extremely associative as one way for me to honor the associative nature of what Jung terms here fantasy thinking.
According to Alexis Pogorelskin's account of the British novelist Phyllis Bottome, the author of the 1937 novel The Mortal Storm, on which the 1940 Hollywood movie The Mortal Storm is based, the novelist Phyllis Bottome engaged in what I would characterize as the associative spirit writ large by associating the action in her 1937 novel with Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) and the American Civil War (1861-1865), and with Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852).
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