RobertKanigel.
(Image by Wikipedia (commons.wikimedia.org), Author: SarahBea at English Wikipedia) Details Source DMCA
Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) December 8, 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). Over the years, I took five courses from Ong at Saint Louis University, the Jesuit university in St. Louis, Missouri.
I survey Ong life and eleven of his books and selected articles in my book Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication, revised and expanded second edition (New York: Hampton Press, 2015; first edition, 2000).
Now, for Ong's massively researched doctoral dissertation on the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572), he visited more than 100 libraries in the British Isles and Continental Europe after World War II, tracking down the more than 750 volumes (most in Latin) by Ramus, his allies, and his critics that Ong briefly annotates in his bibliographic record titled Ramus and Talon Inventory (Harvard University Press, 1958).
In Ong's massively researched book about the history of the verbal arts (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) in Western culture up to and beyond Ramus is titled Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press, 1958). In it, Ong works with what he refers to as the aural-to-visual shift in cognitive processing (see the "Index" for specific page references to the aural-to-visual shift [page 396]).
See my OEN article "Walter J. Ong's Philosophical Thought" (dated September 20, 2020:
For further reading about Ong's themes, see my 2017 resource document "A Concise Guide to Five Themes in Walter J. Ong's Thought and Selected Related Works" that is available online through the University of Minnesota's digital conservancy:
http://hdl.handle.net/11299/189129
Now, Ong's extensive 1958 discussion of the aural-to-visual shift prepared him to write perceptive reviews of Albert B. Lord's 1960 book The Singer of Tales (Harvard University Press) and of Eric A. Havelock's 1963 book Preface to Plato (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). Ong never tired of referring to Lord's and Havelock's books.
Ong's reviews of Lord's and Havelock's books are reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002, pages 301-306 and 309-312).
Now, Ong discusses Albert B. Lord (1912-1991), the Harvard classicist Milman Parry (1902-1935), and the French Jesuit anthropologist Marcel Jousse (1886-1961) in his 1967 seminal book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Yale University Press; on Lord, pages 18, 24-26, 80, and 84; on Parry, pages 18 and 24; and on Jousse, pages 30, 147-148, and 335-336), the expanded version of Ong's 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University.
Volume eight of the 1967 New Catholic Encyclopedia, edited by William J. McDonald and others (New York: McGraw-Hill) includes entries by both Lord and Ong:
(1) Lord's "Literature, Oral Transmission of" (pages 828a-832b);
(2) Ong's "Literature, Written Transmission of" (pages 833a-838b).
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
