Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) October 22, 2021: My favorite scholar is the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955). Ong characterized his mature work from the early 1950s onward as phenomenological and personalist in cast.
For an introductory survey of Ong's life and eleven of his books and selected articles, see my book Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Hampton Press, 2015; 1st ed., 2000).
For a more recent discussion of Ong's phenomenological philosophical thought, see my lengthy OEN article "Walter J. Ong's Philosophical Thought" (dated September 20, 2020):
Now, Paula McDowell in English at New York University uses certain aspects of Ong's thought as a kind of foil over against which she proceeds to develop her thought in her 2017 book The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain (University of Chicago Press). In some of her statements about Ong, she even builds up the influence that she imagines his thought to have had.
Incidentally, Ong served as the Berg Visiting Professor in English at New York University in 1966-1967.
Now, in my estimate, only the following two books show Ong's influence in any significant way:
(1) Marshall McLuhan's pioneering 1962 book about print culture, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press), which McDowell discusses briefly (pages 13 and 14);
(2) the Lutheran biblical scholar Werner H. Kelber's 1983 book about Ong's orality-literacy heuristic, The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q (Philadelphia: Fortress Press), which McDowell does not mention, not even in her subsection titled "The Orality-Literacy Heuristic" (pages 9-26). Incidentally, Ong supplied the "Foreword" in Kelber's 1983 book (pages xiii-xiv).
Ong is a tough act to follow. In my judgment, this is why he has few followers to this day.
Now, to be sure, McLuhan is his pioneering 1962 book about print culture draws significantly from some of Ong's publications up to that time.
Similarly, Kelber's much later 1983 book also draws significantly on a much more extensive range of Ong's publications up to that time. However, I should point out here that Kelber was not familiar with Ong's four essay collections published by Macmillan:
(1) Frontiers in American Catholicism: Essays on Ideology and Culture (1957);
(2) American Catholic Crossroads: Religious-Secular Encounters in the Modern World (1959);
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