(3) In the Human Grain: Further Explorations [By Ong] of Contemporary Culture (New York: Macmillan, 1967);
(4) The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967), the expanded version of Ong's 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University;
(5) Knowledge and the Future of Man: An International Symposium [Of Essays by Diverse Hands] (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968).
Now, when Ong was in New Haven to deliver his 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale, he appeared on a radio talk show Yale Reports with Yale's literary critic William K. Wimsatt (1907-1975). A slightly edited eight-page mimeographed transcription of the interview conducted by Sheila Hough on April 29, 1964, and then broadcast on May 24, 1964, was published as "The Critic and the Arts" by the Yale University Office of Information. In it, among other things, Wimsatt compliments Ong. Wimsatt says, "I would like to pay Father Ong the compliment of saying that I think that his essay "The Jinnee in the well-Wrought Urn" is the most sensible response that has ever been written to that essay of ours" - referring to Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley's essay the "Intentional Fallacy."
In Menand's new book, he says, "With Monroe Beardsley, a philosopher, Wimsatt had published two key statements, both in The Sewanee Review: "The Intentional Fallacy" (1946), which argued that the meaning of a poem must be educed from internal evidence, and "The Affective Fallacy" (1949), which argued that a poem's effect on the reader is irrelevant to how well it functions as a poem. Wimsatt and Beardsley said that they were liberating literary criticism from 'impressionism and relativism' and approaching an 'objective criticism. Both essays were republished in 1954 by the University Press of Kentucky in Wimsatt's The Verbal Icon, a title that captures the New Critical conception of the poem" (page 467; see Menand's "Index" for other references to Wimsatt).
Ong's essay "The Jinnee in the Well-Wrought Urn" was originally published, as Wimsatt noted, in Essays in Criticism (Oxford), volume 4, number 3 (July 1954): pages 309-320. As Wimsatt also noted, Ong reprinted it in his book The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies (New York: Macmillan, 1962, pages 15-25. In addition, it is reprinted in the 600-page anthology An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002, pages 199-208).
On the topic of the New Criticism, also see Ong's essay "The Poem as Closed Field: The Once New Criticism and the Nature of Literature" in his book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1977, pages 213-229).
But also see Ong's essay "Hermeneutic Forever: Voice, Text, Digitization, and the 'I'" in the journal Oral Tradition, volume 10, number 1 (March 1995): pages 3-36. It is reprinted in volume four of Ong's Faith and Contexts, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999, pages 183-204). If I understand Ong's position regarding hermeneutics correctly, he has no problem with what Menand refers to as the "play of interpretation" (page 507).
However, what Ong refers to as the personalist cast of his thought would prevent him from embracing what Menand refers to "nothing" (page 511).
For further discussion of Ong's personalist thought about interpretation, see Thomas D. Zlatic's lengthy essay "Faith in Pretext: An Ongian Context for [Melville's Novel] The Confidence-Man" in the book Of Ong and Media Ecology, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (New York: Hampton Press, 2012, pages 241-280).
Incidentally, in my lengthy "Introduction" to An Ong Reader (pages 1-68), I mention Ong's report that Hannah Arendt once told that he has a dialectical mind, when they both were Fellows at the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University in 1961-1962 (page 3; see Menand's "Index" for specific page references to Arendt).
For a bibliography of Ong's 400 or so publications (not counting translations or reprintings as separate publications), see Thomas M. Walsh's "Walter J. Ong, S.J.: A Bibliography 1929-2006" in the book Language, Culture, and Identity: The Legacy of Walter J. Ong, S.J., edited by Sara van den Berg and Thomas M. Walsh (New York: Hampton Press, 2011, pages 185-245).
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
