Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) August 23, 2023: My favorite scholar is the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian and pioneering media ecology theorist Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) of Saint Louis University, the Jesuit university in the City of St. Louis, Missouri (USA).
Over the years, I took five courses from Ong at Saint Louis University. Most of my professional publications engage Ong's work and related work. I survey his 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, 2nd ed. (Hampton Press, 2015; 1st ed., 2000). It is an intellectual biography of Ong. (As Ong uses the terms phenomenology and phenomenological, he means descriptive.)
In addition, I had the honor of co-editing, with Paul A. Soukup of Santa Clara University, four volumes of Ong's essays published under the title Faith and Contexts (Scholars Press, 1992a, 1992b, 1995, and 1999) - and of contributing introductory essay to three of them (1992a, 1995, and 1999). I also contributed a somewhat lengthy introductory essay to the 600-page volume that I co-edited with Paul A. Soukup titled An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry (Hampton Press, 2002, pp. 1-68).
I have also written about Ong's work in my somewhat lengthy OEN article "Walter J. Ong's Philosophical Thought" (dated September 20, 2020):
Now, in my judgment, Ong is a somebody, not a nobody. But I am a nobody, not an important somebody. My academic achievements do not qualify me to be considered an important somebody. Whenever I happen to die, the New York Times is not likely to publish an obituary about me, because my academic achievements are too modest to merit such an obituary. However, when Ong died in 2003, the New York Times did publish an obituary about him, because his academic achievements were, and still are, worthy of such a public form of recognition in America's newspaper of record. In short, I am nobody important writing about somebody important.
However, despite the numerous forms of academic recognition that Ong received over his lifetime, which I have detailed in my book about his life and work, he has not been lionized by his fellow Americans, his fellow academics, or his fellow Roman Catholics.
Now, Thomas D. Zlatic (born in 1947; Ph.D. in English, Saint Louis University, 1974) has written perceptively and articulately about certain crucial points in Ong's thought in his beautiful essay "The Articulate Self in a Particulate World: The Ins and Outs of Ong" 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 (Hampton Press, 2011, pp. 7-30) - a collection of papers presented at the Ong Conference at Saint Louis University in 2005.
Zlatic has also written about certain other important points in Ong's thought in his somewhat lengthy essay "Faith in Pretext: An Ongian Context for [Herman Melville's Novel] The Confidence-Man" in the book Of Ong and Media Ecology, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Hampton Press, 2012, pp. 239-278).
In these two fine essays, Zlatic perceptively and meticulously scrutinizes certain key concepts in Ong's wide-ranging work.
Not counting translations or reprintings as distinct publications, Ong has more than 400 distinct publications to his credit. Thomas M. Walsh provides a briefly annotated bibliography of Ong's publications in "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 (Hampton Press, 2011, pp. 185-245). (Walsh lists Ong's published juvenilia in 1929.)
Now, Zlatic has also distinguished himself as an Ong scholar by editing and contributing commentaries to Ong's posthumously published uncompleted book Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization, edited and with commentaries by Thomas D. Zlatic and Sara van den Berg (Cornell University Press, 2017). (Hermeneutic means interpretation.)
But also see Ong's article "Hermeneutic Forever: Voice, Text, Digitization, and the 'I'" in the journal Oral Tradition, volume 10 (1995): pp. 3-26; it is reprinted in volume four of Ong's Faith and Contexts, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Scholars Press, 1999, pp. 183-204).
Now, because hope springs eternal in me that I might write something about Ong's work that will help catapult him to renewed public attention, I now want to turn my attention in the present review essay to discussing Zlatic's beautiful essay "The Articulate Self in a Particulate World: The Ins and Outs of Ong" (2011). No doubt Ong was articulate. Zlatic's playful wording "The Ins and Outs" calls attention to the playful central psychodynamic in Ong's work.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
