Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) September 10, 2023: At this time, fans of the English Catholic novelist J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973) are commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of his death.
In the present essay, I would like to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the death of 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) - by first reviewing the sweep of his life and work, and then by highlighting his significant contribution in the important subsection "Procedures: Understanding and Asymmetric Opposition" in his 1981 book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality [Gender], and Consciousness (Cornell University Press, pp. 29-34), the published version of his 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University.
Ong was born in 1912 - before the First World War (1914-1918 - the year in which Walter Jr. turned six years old) and America's entry into WWI, before the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the rise of communism as an economic system threatening American capitalism, before the rise of literary modernism, followed by the rise of the New Criticism in literary studies - and before much else that emerged in Western culture as young Walter Jackson Ong, Jr., was growing up and then going to college and then entering the Jesuit order in 1935 - thus signaling the priority of his religious commitment to Catholicism in his life.
In 1922, two of the most celebrated masterpieces of literary modernism were published: (1) T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land and (2) James Joyce's novel Ulysses. Eliot was also a prodigious literary critic who contributed to the New Criticism - even though he was not an academic.
Because Ong had entered the Jesuit order in 1935, he devoted the subsequent years of his young life to his lengthy Jesuit formation - finally being ordained a Jesuit priest in 1946 - the year in which Ong turned thirty-four.
The year before, President Harry Truman brought the Second World War (1939-1945) to a tragic conclusion by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - the tragic event commemorated in this summer's blockbuster film Oppenheimer.
After Ong was ordained a priest in 1946, he completed a final year of his Jesuit formation, known in Jesuit parlance as tertianship (a third year of novitiate-like living) -- before he proceeded to undertake doctoral studies in English at Harvard University.
At that time, the New Criticism was in the ascendancy in literary studies in the English-speaking world - and Yale's English Department was a stronghold of New Criticism in the United States. In general, New Critics tended to favor literary modernism.
When young Ong was working on his 1941 Master's degree in English at Saint Louis University, he studied under the young Canadian, and recent Catholic convert, Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), fresh from his studies under F. R. Leavis (1895-1978) and I. A. Richards (1893-1979) at Cambridge University - two prominent figures in the rise of New Criticism in literary studies. Both Leavis and Richards had published important essays on the posthumously published (in the 1920s) poems of the Victorian Jesuit poet and classicist Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), and young McLuhan at Saint Louis University brought Hopkins' poetry to the attention of young Walter Ong.
In addition, young McLuhan was working on his Cambridge University doctoral dissertation as he taught English at Saint Louis University, and in connection with his own research for it, he called young Walter Ong's attention to Harvard's Americanist Perry Miller's massively researched 1939 book The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Harvard University Press).
In 1943, young Ong had published the article "The Meaning of the New Criticism" in the journal Modern Schoolman (Saint Louis University), volume 20, number 4 (May 1943): pp. 192-209.
In any event, when young Ong chose not to pursue doctoral studies in English at Yale University, he was, in effect, distancing himself a bit from the New Criticism that was in ascendancy in literary studies in the United States.
Yale's literary critics Cleanth Brooks (1906-1994) and Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) co-authored the textbook Understanding Poetry (1938) that was widely used in English departments in the United States to teach the New Criticism to undergraduates - as it went through subsequent revisions in subsequent editions. When I took Ong's course on Practical Criticism: Poetry in the fall semester of 1964 at Saint Louis University, a later edition of Brooks and Warren's book Understanding Poetry was one of the two required textbooks in the course. Incidentally, Ong also assigned us to read Eliot's book Of Poetry and Poets (1957).
At Harvard's Department of English, the Americanist Perry Miller (1905-1963) served as the director of Ong's doctoral dissertation on the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572). In Perry Miller's massively researched 1939 book The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, mentioned above, he had done his best to explain Ramus' work (for specific page references to Ramus, see the "Index" [p. 528]). However, Miller also sensed the limitations of his own presentation of Ramus' thought, and so he called for someone else to undertake a more thorough study of Ramus' work. About a decade later, Ong stepped forward to undertake that project.
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