(3) Ong's 1982 plenary address "The Agonistic Base of Scientifically Abstract Thought: Issues in Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness" that is reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (2002, pages 479-495).
For Ong's discussions of post-Renaissance Latin as a second language, see his 1962 book The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies (see the index for "Latin" for specific page references).
SCOTT NEWSTOK'S NEW BOOK ABOUT SHAKESPEARE
Ong was an educator in the Jesuit order, in which educators were historically over-represented. As we have seen, he wrote about Renaissance education extensively, including early Jesuit education. However, he did not publish under his own byline any detailed advice for contemporary educators to follow.
But in 1966-1967, Ong served on the 14-member White House Task Force that reported to President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967. Of course, the Task Force's recommendations to the president did not involve recommendations about lessons in how to think like Shakespeare.
Subsequently, Ong served on the 32-member Commission on the Humanities, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, that issued the 1980 book The Humanities in American Life (see the index for "Writing instruction" for specific page references).
Ong's widely cited 1975 article "The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction" implicitly offers advice to writers that they need to learn how to imagine a fictional audience that they are writing for. He reprinted it, slightly revised, in his 1977 book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (pages 53-81). It is also reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry (2002, pages 405-427).
Now, Scott Newstok (born in 1973; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 2002), who is familiar with Ong's work to a certain extent, is the author of the 2009 book Quoting Death in Early Modern England: The Poetics of Epitaphs Beyond the Tomb. He edited Michael Cavanaugh's posthumously published 2020 book Paradise Lost : A Primer. He also edited the 2007 book Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare. In addition, Newstok and Ayanna Thompson co-edited the 2010 anthology Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance.
For Ong, the American literary critic Kenneth Burke (1897-1993) is not a regular conversation partner. However, Ong does prominently mention Burke, albeit in passing, in his 1962 book The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies (pages 16 and 185).
In Newstok's new 2020 book How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education, Newstok frames his own presentations in a polemical framework by regularly referring to questionable contemporary notions about education (such as assessment) most of which are easy targets for him to score points against. But the advantage of the polemical framework is that it distracts us from the fundamentally conservative orientation of Newstok's enterprise in attempting to retrieve for our time lessons and practices from the past. But he further distracts us from his fundamentally conservative enterprise by arguing that paradoxically "mental play emerges through work, creativity through imitation, autonomy through tradition, innovation through constraint, and freedom through discipline."
For Ong's essay that is most related to Newstok's paradoxical arguments, see his "Preface" to the American edition of the English translation of the German Jesuit theologian and church historian Hugo Rahner's book Man at Play, translated by Brian Battershaw and Edward Quinn (1967, pages ix-xiv); reprinted as "Preface to Man at Play" in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry (2002, pages 345-348).
For both Rahner and Ong, the classic study of play is Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1949 in English; orig. German ed., 1938; revised ed., 1944). If you'll forgive the play on words, the playwright Shakespeare is most famous for his plays and our famous playwright even has Hamlet famously say, "The play's the thing" (Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2, Line 604). Perhaps Shakespeare-the-playwright thought that the play's the thing to catch the "conscience" (or at least the attention) of each actively participating audience member taking in the play and thereby evoke his or her thought.
As an aside, I would point out here that the Homeric epics the Iliad and the Odyssey consist mostly of speeches with the oral singer of the tales dramatically performing each new speech in turn with his voice, as each actor in a play by Shakespeare, including Shakespeare himself at times as one of the actors, vocalized and dramatized each speech. While each of Shakespeare's plays is considerably shorter than either Homeric epic, we should not fail to note how each of his plays resembles the oral art of the Homeric epics which were the vernacular in their ancient cultural context, as were Shakespeare's works in his cultural context.
In the 1991 book Homer and the Origins of the Greek Alphabet, the American classicist Barry B. Powell argues that certain ancient Greeks invented the vowelized phonetic alphabetic Greek writing system to be able to capture the vernacular Greek of the Homeric epics.
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