I want to sing the Song of Walter Jackson Ong, S.J. (1912-2003). His thought is important for people today to understand, so that we can get our bearings about Western culture in the world today. Had Samuel Huntington understood Ong's thought about Western cultural development, he could have used Ong's thought to deepen and strengthen his clash-of-civilizations thesis. The clash of cultures is inevitable, but violence is not.

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Duluth, MN (OpEdNews) March 12, 2010 Rob Kall is familiar with Walter J. Ong, S.J. (1912-2003). But Rob is an old guy. I am even older born in 1944! It strikes me that I should write something introductory about Ong for the benefit of OpEdNews readers who are younger than Rob and who may not be familiar with Ong's thought about communication media.

Let's start with his full name: Walter Jackson Ong, Jr. The family name is English. For many centuries, it was spelled Onge. It is probably related to the English name Yonge as in the name of a famous street in Toronto. Ong's earliest ancestors came to this country on the same ship with Roger Williams. They came here from East Anglia, where Cambridge University is located. The name Jackson commemorates the family relation President Andrew Jackson.

Walter Jackson Ong, Sr., was a Protestant. But his wife was a Roman Catholic. As a result, Walter Jr. and his younger brother were raised as Roman Catholics. Walter Jr. grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, where he attended Catholic schools and then the Jesuit high school and the Jesuit college in Kansas City. As an undergraduate, he majored in Latin. But he also had enough credits in both biology and philosophy for a major in each of them.

After he graduated from Rockhurst College in 1933 (six months before he turned 21), Ong worked for a couple of years. But then he entered the Jesuit novitiate in Florissant, Missouri, in the fall of 1935. The Jesuit novitiate is a two-year novitiate. The novitiate in Florissant was a farm at the time. But today Florissant is a distant suburb of the City of St. Louis.

Next, he was sent for further studies in the humanities to Saint Louis University (SLU) in St. Louis, Missouri. Next, he advanced to the study of philosophy at SLU. At that time the SLU Department of Philosophy was large, as it continued to be over the next several decades, when Ong himself returned to SLU with his Ph.D. in English from Harvard University to teach English at SLU from 1954 to 1984.

In the late 1930s, the philosophy courses at SLU for young Jesuits in training were taught in Latin the class lectures, the assigned readings, and the tests were all in Latin, as were all the theology courses that Ong later took in the 1940s as part of his Jesuit training at SLU, but at a temporary location in Kansas. That temporary location endured for several decades.

As Ong was pursuing his graduate studies in philosophy, he also pursued a Master's degree in English at SLU. This brought him in contact with the bright and loquacious young Canadian Marshall McLuhan, a recent convert to Roman Catholicism who taught English at SLU from 1937 to 1944. However, one academic year McLuhan took a leave of absence from SLU and returned to Cambridge University to continue his research on his doctoral dissertation. His doctoral dissertation was a study of Thomas Nashe in connection with the learning of his time the learning of his time involving the verbal arts known as grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic (or logic). McLuhan completed his doctoral dissertation in 1943. In 2006 Gingko Press in California published McLuhan's unrevised dissertation as the book The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time, edited by W. Terrence Gordon.

Because McLuhan was researching the learning of Nashe's time (roughly Shakespeare's time), McLuhan was alert to Perry Miller's then-new book The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Harvard University Press, 1939). The English immigrants in Massachusetts Bay Colony had immigrated there from East Anglia, where a number of them had studied at CambridgeUniversity when the work of the French logician and educational reformer Peter Ramus (1515-1572) was being lionized there, as it continued to be in John Milton's time there as well. Perry Miller reports that he had found only one self-described Aristotelian in seventeenth-century New England everybody else was a Ramist.

McLuhan alerted Ong about Miller's book. Miller had done his best to understand and explain Ramus' work. But toward the end of his book he called for somebody to undertake a far more thorough study of Ramus' work and its European context. In the late 1940s, after Ong had completed his theological studies and had been ordained a priest, he advanced with three graduate degrees in hand to HarvardUniversity to undertake doctoral studies in English. Perry Miller served as the director of Ong's ambitious doctoral dissertation about Ramus and Ramism.

With the financial assistance of two Guggenheim Fellowships, Ong lived abroad for about four years researching his dissertation. By virtue of being a Jesuit, he was entitled to request to live in Jesuit residences, which put him on touch with local Jesuits who knew the areas where they lived. He worked in more than 100 libraries in the British Isles and Continental Europe tracking down the more than 750 volumes he lists and briefly describes in Ramus and Talon Inventory (Harvard University Press, 1958), which he dedicates to Marshall McLuhan.

Its companion volume is Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press, 1958). In 2004, the year after Ong's death, the University of Chicago Press reissued it in a paperback edition with a new foreword by Adrian Johns. In this book Ong works with the contrast of oral-aural and visual, a contrast with which he also works in many of the essays reprinted in his collection The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Studies and Essays (Macmillan, 1962).

But those two big volumes about Ramus and Ramism put Ong on the intellectual map as a big-league thinker, because most Harvard professors had to acknowledge that they had not undertaken such a massively researched and intellectually ambitious study. In 1963, the French government dubbed Ong a knight, an honor rarely bestowed on someone who is not a French citizen.

I would characterize the next events in Ong's life as one blessing after another after another after another after another . . . . You get the idea.

As we now proceed to review significant events in Ong's lifetime, please remember that in the years of Ong's lifetime the United States was engaged in the Cold War, and Americans lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the black civil rights movement, the American imperialistic war in Vietnam, the women's movement, the Supreme Court's decision to legalize abortion, the fall of the Berlin wall, the break up of the old Soviet Union, the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, and the American imperialistic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are still ongoing.

During the 1960s and the 1970s and into the 1980s, Ong was very active on the academic lecture circuit both in the United States and abroad. Moreover, during the late 1960s and the 1970s, McLuhan was arguably the most publicized English teacher in the English-speaking world. (He died in 1980.)

In 1960, Harvard University Press published Albert B. Lord's book about oral tradition involving non-literate performers, The Singer of Tales.

In 1962, the University of Toronto Press published Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, which Ong told us in the spring of 1966 in a course I took from him to read with a grain of salt. Ong never tired of praising his former teacher.

In 1963, Harvard University Press published Eric A. Havelock's very accessible classic study of the Homeric oral mentality.

Ong never tired of referring to Lord's and Havelock's books.

In 1964, Ong delivered the Terry Lectures at Yale University, which were published as The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Yale University Press, 1967).

In the fall of 1964, I took my first upper-division English course from Ong at SLU, Practical Criticism: Poetry. In the spring of 1966, I took Practical Criticism: Prose from him.

In 1967, Macmillan published Ong's collection In the Human Grain: Further Explorations of Contemporary Culture.

In 1967-1968, Ong served as one of 14 persons on the White House Task Force on Education, which reported to President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968.

In 1971, Ong was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 1971, Cornell University Press published Ong's big collection Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture.

In 1974, Ong was selected as one of about a dozen Americans who served as Lincoln Lecturers and went on lecture tours abroad in connection with the 25th anniversary of the Fulbright Act.

In 1977, Cornell University Press published Ong's other big collection Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture. In the preface Ong explicitly articulates what he styles his relationist thesis regarding cultural developments being related to transformations of the word (9-10).

In 1978, Ong served as the elected president of the 30,000-member Modern Language Association of America.

In 1979, Ong delivered the Messenger Lectures at CornellUniversity, which were published as Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Cornell University Press, 1981).

In 1981, Ong delivered the Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto, which were published as Hopkins, the Self, and God (University of Toronto Press, 1986).

In 1982, Methuen published in the New Accents series Ong's most widely known book, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (now published by Routledge).

In the 1990s, Scholars Press, the publishing arm of the AmericanAcademy of Religion, published four volumes of Ong's essays under the general title Faith and Contexts, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (1992a, 1992b, 1995, 1999).

In 2000, Hampton Press published in the Media Ecology series my book Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication, which is a reader's guide to eleven of Ong's books.

In 2002, Hampton Press published An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup, the biggest single-volume collection of pieces by Ong a very accessible collection.

On August 12, 2003, Walter Ong died of pneumonia in a suburban St. Louis hospital. He had suffered from Parkinson's disease for a number of years and as a result was frail and susceptible to pneumonia. He was 90. He lived a full and productive life. May he rest in peace.

Not bad, eh, for a Roman Catholic priest who came to public prominence at a time when the anti-Catholic spirit of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) culture was still alive and well in the United States?

In the near future Hampton Press is scheduled to publish the revised and expanded edition of my book-length study of Ong's thought. It will include an new afterword by the author and an updated bibliography. Since the time in the late 1990s when I submitted my manuscript to Hampton Press, about 100 new books have come to me attention that can be related in one way or another to Ong's thought. I wish that Walter Ong had lived to see all of them.

But apart from the fact that a good number of scholars have recently published books about themes that can be related in one way or another to Ong's thought, is Ong's multivariate account of Western cultural development important for educated Americans to know about and understand?

Ong's multivariate thought is important for liberals and conservatives alike to understand in order to get their cultural bearings about the world today. The world today can be understood in terms of Western culture versus all the other cultures in the world. Ong's multivariate account of the development of Western culture can help us understand certain distinctive features about Western culture, features that are not as widely characteristic of non-Western cultures today as they are of Western culture for example, the quantification of thought in modern science and the culture of modern science; the transformed agonistic structures of modern science and modern capitalism; the inward turn of consciousness (David Riesman's inner-directedness) connected with modern science, modern capitalism, modern democracy (as exemplified in the United States), the Industrial Revolution, and the Romantic Movement; and the visualist tendencies that are integral to modernity.

Arguably one of the most significant transformations that occurred in emerging modernity involved what Ong styles agonistic structures. In Manliness (Yale University Press, 2006: 230), Harvey C. Mansfield in effect writes about agonistic structures. The title of his book involves the meaning of the Greek term andreia, which means both courage and manliness. In any event, Mansfield makes a telling observation about modernity: "The entire enterprise of modernity . . . could be understood as a project to keep manliness unemployed." Yes, it could. In the history of modern literature, the rise of the mock epic should be understood as showing the waning of the old oral manliness and the code of the hero, as should the later rise of the antihero in literature. In general, the old oral orientation toward the heroic gives way to the inward turn of consciousness toward inner-directedness. Nevertheless, modernity cannot be understood as keeping agonistic structures entirely unemployed, for modern capitalism and modern science employ agonistic structures, as do old warrior religions such as Christianity and Islam. Moreover, in American popular culture today, we find an extraordinary fascination with the agonistic spirit in televised sports and in comics and action movies.

For Ong, the corpuscular sense of life is expressed not only in visualist tendencies in ancient Greek philosophy and in modern print culture but also in the oral sense of life as event. But as Plato and Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and Bernard Lonergan and Ong understand the human mind, the human mind transcends the corpuscular sense of life. Even though the prolific conservative Roman Catholic writer Michael Novak gives no evidence of having studied Ong's thought about the corpuscular sense of life in depth, he has studied Lonergan's thought well enough to grasp how the human mind is different from the corpuscular sense of life that Ong writes about. In the introduction to the recent reprinting of his 1965 book Belief and Unbelief: A Philosophy of Self-Knowledge (Transaction Publishers, 1994: xv), Novak sets forth the following critique of the visualist tendencies in Richard Rorty's thought:

Rorty thinks that in showing that the mind is not "the mirror of nature" he has disproved the correspondence theory of truth. What he has really shown is that the activities of the human mind cannot be fully expressed by metaphors based upon the operations of the eye [see Ong's visualist tendencies]. We do not know simply through "looking at" reality as though our minds were simply mirrors of reality. One needs to be very careful not to confuse the activities of the mind with the operations of any (or all) bodily senses [see Ong's critique of the corpuscular sense of life]. In describing how our minds work, one needs to beware of being bewitched by the metaphors that spring from the operations of our senses. Our minds are not like our eyes; or, rather, their activities are far richer, more complex, and more subtle than those of our eyes. It is true that we often say, on getting the point, "Oh, I see!" But putting things together and getting the point normally involve a lot more than "seeing," and all that we need to do to get to that point can scarcely be met simply by following the imperative, "Look!" Even when the point, once grasped, may seem to have been (as it were) right in front of us all along, the reasons why it did not dawn upon us immediately may be many, including the fact that our imaginations were ill-arranged, so that we were expecting and "looking for" the wrong thing. To get to the point at which the evidence finally hits us, we may have to undergo quite a lot of dialectical argument and self-correction.

I do not understand Jacques Derrida's thought about phonocentrism and logocentrism well enough to compare his thought with Ong's critique of the corpuscular sense of life, so I will leave it to someone else to undertake constructing a comparison and contrast of their thought.

In any event, had Samuel P. Huntington understood Ong's multivariate account of Western cultural history, he could have used Ong's thought to deepen and strengthen his clash-of-civilizations thesis in the 1990s, which seemed to be confirmed by the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.

For readers who might be interested in reading further about the quantification of thought, agonistic structures, the inward turn of consciousness, and visualist tendencies, I add now a bibliographic listing of selected relevant works. We can obviously separate these factors for study and discussion. But these factors at times inter-acted with one another in ways that are at times difficult to discuss.

SELECTED WORKS ABOUT THE QUANTIFICATION OF THOUGHT

Bochenski, I. M. A History of Formal Logic, translated from the 1956 German original and edited by Ivo Thomas. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1961. See the index for quantification.

Clark, Joseph T. Conventional Logic and Modern Logic: A Prelude to Transition. Washington, DC: American Catholic Philosophical Association, 1952. Cited by Ong. See the index for quantification.

Crosby, Alfred W. The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600. Cambridge, England: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1997.

Hay, Cynthia, ed. Mathematics from Manuscript to Print 1300-1600. Oxford: Clarendon Press of OxfordUniversity Press, 1988.

Hobart, Michael E. and Zachary S. Schiffman. Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution. Baltimore, Maryland; and London, England: JohnsHopkinsUniversity Press, 1998.

Kneale, William and Martha Kneale. The Development of Logic. Oxford: Clarendon Press of OxfordUniversity Press, 1962. See the index for quantification.

Ong, Walter J. Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason. Cambridge, Massachusetts: HarvardUniversity Press, 1958. A classic study of print culture. Regarding the quantification of thought, see especially pages 53-91. In The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1962: 72), Ong explains the overall import of the quantification of thought in medieval logic: "In this historical perspective, medieval scholastic logic appears as a kind of premathemics, a subtle and unwitting preparation for the large-scale operations in quantitative modes of thinking which will characterize the modern world. In assessing the meaning of [medieval] scholasticism, one must keep in mind an important and astounding fact: in the whole history of the human mind, mathematics and mathematical physics come into their own, in a way which has changed the face of the earth and promises or threatens to change it even more, at only one place and time, that is, in Western Europe immediately after the [medieval] scholastic experience [in short, in print culture]. Elsewhere, no matter how advanced the culture on other scores, and even along mathematical lines, as in the case of the Babylonian, nothing like a real mathematical transformation of thinking takes place not among the ancient Egyptians or Assyrians or Greeks or Romans, not among the peoples of India nor the Chinese nor the Japanese, not among the Aztecs or Mayas, not in Islam despite the promisings beginnings there, any more than among the Tartars or the Avars or the Turks. These people can all now share the common scientific knowledge, but the scientific tradition itself which they share is not a merging of various parallel discoveries made by their various civilizations. It represents a new state of mind. However great contributions other civilizations may hereafter make to the tradition, our scientific world traces its origins back always to seventeenth and sixteenth century Europe [in short, to Copernicus and Galileo], to the place where for some three centuries and more the [medieval] arts course taught in universities and parauniversity schools had pounded into the heads of youth a study program consisting almost exclusively of a highly quantified logic and a companion physics, both taught on a scale and with an enthusiasm never approximated or even dreamt of in ancient academies" (emphasis added). Ong's 1958 book about Ramus and Ramism was reprinted in 2004 by the University of Chicago Press with a new foreword by Adrian Johns.

Quine, Willard Van Orman. Mathematical Logic, 2nd ed. Cambridge, Massachusetts: HarvardUniversity Press, 1951. Cited by Ong. See the index for quantification.

SELECTED WORKS ABOUT AGONISTIC STRUCTURES

Appleby, Joyce. Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2010. What Appleby refers to as relentless revolution involves the agonistic structures of the human psyche, which capitalism takes to a new level as does modern science.

Bakan, David. The Duality of Human Existence: An Essay on Psychology and Religion. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1966. David Bakan defines and explains two central tendencies in human nature, which he refers to as agency and communion. What he means by agency is the psychodynamism of the agonistic spirit discussed by Walter J. Ong. In The Psychology of Gender, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2009), Vicki S. Helgeson works with Bakan's terms of agency and communion. In my article "The Female and Male Modes of Rhetoric" in the professional journal College English (Urbana, Illinois), 40, 8 (April 1979): 909-21, I have defined two modes of rhetoric that decidedly resemble what Bakan means by agency and communion. On page 910, I make the following brief characterizations: "The thinking represented in the female mode [of rhetoric] seems eidetic, methectic, open-ended, and generative, whereas the thinking in the male mode [of rhetoric] appears framed, contained, more pre-selected, and packaged."

Bloom, Harold. Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism. Oxford and New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1982.

Bowra, C. M. Heroic Poetry. London: Macmillan, 1952.

Broich, Ulrich. The Eighteenth-Century Mock-Heroic Poem, translated from the 1968 German original by David Henry Wilson. Cambridge, England: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1990. In The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies (New York: Macmillan, 1962: 188-89, 218), Walter J. Ong discusses the mock epic as a manifestation of the humanist shift toward writing, which meant the waning of the old oral agonistic tendencies linked to the Latin language.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 3rd ed. Novato, California: New World Library, 2008. Very accessible.

Deme, Mariam Konate. Heroism and the Supernatural in the African Epic. New York and London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2010, forthcoming.

Farrell, Thomas J. "Faulkner and Male Agonism." In Dennis L. Weeks and Jane Hoogestraat, eds., Time, Memory, and the Verbal Arts: Essays on the Thought of Walter Ong. Cranbury, NJ, and London, UK: Associated University Presses, 1998. 203-21. Explores an important theme in Faulkner's life and novels.

Gribbin, John. Science: A History 1543-2001. London: Allen Lane/Penguin Books, 2002. The rise of modern science in print culture transformed the agonistic spirit of pro-and-con debate in the verbal arts of rhetoric and dialectic to a new level, just as the rise of modern capitalism in print culture also transformed the agonistic spirit to a new level.

Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. The translator is not identified by name. London: Routledge, 1949. A classic.

Koziak, Barbara. Retrieving Political Emotion: Thumos, Aristotle, and Gender. University Park, Pennsylvania: PennsylvaniaStateUniversity Press, 2000. The part of the human psyche that Plato and Aristotle refer to as "thumos" (usually rendered as the spirited part) is the psychodynamism of agonistic behavior.

Lloyd, G. E. R. Polarity and Analogy: Two Types of Argumentation in Early Greek Thought. Cambridge, England: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1966.

MacLean, Paul D. The Triune Brain in Evolution: Role in Paleocerebral Functions. New York and London: Plenum Press, 1990. Paul D. MacLean contends that the human brain is made up of three separate brains, which function together interactively in the way that he characterizes as constituting the triune human brain. What MacLean refers to as the reptilian brain is the biological base for all agonistic tendencies in all animals, including the human animal.

Maier, Pauline; Merritt Roe Smith; Alexander Keyssar; and Daniel J. Kevles. Inventing America: A History of the United States, 2nd ed. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2006. Very accessible and thorough textbook about the agonistic spirit as inventive. Also published in a two-volume paperback edition.

Moore, Robert and Douglas Gillette. The Warrior Within: Accessing the Knight [Archetype] in the Male Psyche. New York: William Morrow, 1992. Very accessible. (There is a corresponding Warrior archetype in the female psyche.)

Nagy, Gregory. The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 2nd ed. Baltimore, Maryland; and London, England: JohnsHopkinsUniversity Press, 1998.

Neumann, Eric. The Origins and History of Consciousness, translated from the 1949 German original by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton, New Jersey: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1954. A classic.

Ong, Walter J. "Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite. Studies in Philology, 56, 2 (April 1959): 103-24. Reprinted in Ong's Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Ithaca, New York; and London, England: Cornell University Press, 1971: 113-41).

Ong, Walter J. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. New Haven, Connecticut; and London, England: YaleUniversity Press, 1967. See pages 192-286.

Ong, Walter J. "Rhetoric and the Origins of Consciousness." Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture. Ithaca, New York; and London, England: CornellUniversity Press, 1971. 1-22.

Ong, Walter J. Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness. Ithaca, New York and London, England: CornellUniversity Press, 1981. Very accessible. Ong's 1979 Messenger Lectures at CornellUniversity.

Ong, Walter J. "The Agonistic Base of Scientifically Abstract Thought: Issues in fighting for life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness." In Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Desmond J. Fitzgerald, and John T. Noonan, Jr., eds., Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association (Catholic University of America), 56 (1982): 109-24. Reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Cresskill, New Jersey, 2002: 479-95).

Ong, Walter J. Introduction [To Milton's Logic]. In Maurice Kelley, ed., Complete Prose Works of John Milton: Volume VIII: 1666-1682. New Haven, Connecticut; and London, England: YaleUniversity Press, 1982. 139-205. Reprinted as "Introduction to Milton's Logic" in Ong's Faith and Contexts: Volume Four, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999: 111-42.

Parks, Ward. Verbal Dueling in Heroic Narrative: The Homeric and Old English Traditions. Princeton, New Jersey: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1990.

Sloane, Thomas O. On the Contrary: The Protocol of Traditional Rhetoric. Washington, D.C.: CatholicUniversity of America Press, 1997. Thomas O. Sloane focuses on the pro-and-con debate protocol in traditional rhetoric in Western culture. But not only the verbal art known as rhetoric, but also the verbal art known as dialectic inculcated the spirit of pro-and-con debate. In Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1958), Walter J. Ong shows how Peter Ramus (1515-1572) and Ramism in effect moved away from the protocol of pro-and-con debate in favor of setting forth one's own line of argument without explicit reference to real or imaginary adversarial positions or possible objections.

Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage, with an introduction by Solon T. Kimball, translated from the 1908 French original by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960.

Whitman, Cedric H. Homer and the Heroic Tradition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: HarvardUniversity Press, 1958.

SELECTED WORKS ABOUT THE INWARD TURN OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Armstrong, Nancy and Leonard Tennenhouse. The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1992.

Brakke, David. Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity. Cambridge, Massachusetts; and London, England: HarvardUniversity Press, 2006.

Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books/ Penguin Putnam, 1998. Very accessible, but overflowing with hyperbolic claims.

Cary, Phillip. Augustine's Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2000.

Connor, James L. The Dynamic of Desire: Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S.J., on the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. St. Louis, Missouri: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2006.

Kahler, Erich. The Inward Turn of Narrative, translated from the original 1970 German by Richard Winston and Clara Winston. Princeton, Pennsylvania: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1973.

Low, Anthony. Aspects of Subjectivity: Society and Individuality from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare and Milton. Pittsburg, Pennsylvania: DuquesneUniversity Press, 2003.

Maus, Katharine Eisaman. Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Ong, Walter J. "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction." PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association, 90, 1 (January 1975): 9-22. Very accessible. Reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2002: 405-27).

Ong, Walter J. Hopkins, the Self, and God. Toronto; Buffalo; London: University of Toronto Press, 1986. Very accessible. Ong's 1981 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto.

Renevy, Denis. Language, Self and Love: Hermeneutics in the Writings of Richard Rolfe and the Commentaries on the Song of Songs. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001.

Riesman, David with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, abridged and revised edition with a foreword by Todd Gitlin. New Haven, Connecticut; and London, England: YaleUniversity Press, 2000. Very accessible.

Williams, Bernard. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley; Los Angeles; Oxford: University of California Press, 1993.

SELECTED WORKS ABOUT VISUALIST TENDENCIES

Anderson, Patricia. The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture 1790-1860. Oxford: Clarendon Press of OxfordUniversity Press, 1991.

Barchas, Janine. Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Cambridge, England: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2003.

Biernoff, Suzannah. Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages. Basinstoke, England; and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

Boman, Thorleif. Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek, translated from the 1960 revised German by Jules L. Moreau. London: SCM Press, 1960. A classic.

Brennan, Teresa and Martin Jay, eds. Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight. New York and London: Routledge, 1996.

Bultmann, Rudolf. Gnosis, translated from the original 1933 German by J. R. Coates. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1952. A classic.

Crossan, John Dominic and Jonathan L. Reed. Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001.

Crossan, John Dominic and Jonathan L. Reed. In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom: A New Vision of Paul's Words & World. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancsco, 2004. Very accessible.

Dimmick, Jeremy; James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman, eds. Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and Visual Image. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2002.

Elsner, Jas and Ian Rutherford, eds. Pilgrimage in Graeco-Roman & Early Christian Antiquity: Seeing the Gods. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2005.

Elsner, Jas. Roman Eyes: Visuality & Subjectivity in Art & Text. Princeton, New Jersey; and Oxford, England: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2007.

Gerard, W. B. Laurence Sterne and the Visual Imagination. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2006.

Hageman, Marielle and Marco Mostert, eds. Reading Images and Texts: Medieval Images and Texts as Forms of Communication. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2005.

Havelock, Eric A. Preface to Plato. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of HarvardUniversity Press, 1963. A classic study of the Homeric oral mentality.

Havelock, Eric A. The Greek Concept of Justice: From Its Shadow in Homer to Its Substance in Plato. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: HarvardUniversity Press, 1978.

Havelock, Eric A. The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences. Princeton, New Jersey: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1982.

Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1993.

Koerner, Joseph Leo. The Reformation of the Image. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Levin, David Michael, ed. Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1993.

Levin, David Michael. The Philosopher's Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1999.

Lonergan, Bernard. Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, 5th ed., edited by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran. Volume 3 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan. Toronto; Buffalo; London: University of Toronto Press, 1992. A classic. Lonergan mocks the tendency to equate knowing with "taking a good look." In Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue and elsewhere, Walter J. Ong refers to this tendency as visualism and hypervisualism.

Nie, Giselle de; Karl F. Morrison and Marco Mostert, eds. Seeing the Invisible in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2005.

Nightingale, Andrea Wilson. Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in Its Cultural Context. Cambridge, England: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2004.

Ong, Walter J. Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason. Cambridge, Massachusetts: HarvardUniversity Press, 1958. A classic study of print culture. Reprinted with a new foreword by Adrian Johns by the University of Chicago Press in 2004. On page 338, in note 54, Ong credits the French philosopher Louis Lavelle (1883-1951) with "a discerning and profound treatment of the visual-oral opposition on which the present discussion [in Ong's book] turns," and Ong refers especially to Lavelle's La parole et l'ecriture (Paris, 1942). In his book Ong refers to the corpuscular sense of life with various terms: corpuscular view of reality, corpuscular epistemology, corpuscular psychology (pages 65-66, 72, 146, 171, 203, 210). For all practical purposes the corpuscular sense of life that Ong refers to is involved in what Bernard Lonergan mocks in Insight: A Study of Human Understanding as the tendency to equate knowing with "taking a good look." Ong also refers to the visualist loading of this tendency as visualism and hypervisualism.

Ong, Walter J. The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays. New York: Macmillan, 1962. See the index for "visualism."

Ong, Walter J. "World as View and World as Event." American Anthropologist, 71, 4 (August 1969): 634-47. Reprinted in Ong's Faith and Contexts: Volume Three, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995: 69-90). In Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, Ong refers to the corpuscular sense of life with various terms: corpuscular view of life, corpuscular epistemology, corpuscular psychology (pages 65-66, 72, 146, 171, 203, 210). Both the world-as-view sense of life and the world-as-event sense of life involve the corpuscular sense of life. In Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, Bernard Lonergan explains how understanding involves reflecting on sensory data and making judgments about what conceptual constructs and predications are most reasonable and tenable.

Ong, Walter J. "'I See What You Say': Sense Analogues for Intellect." Human Inquiries: Review of Existentialist Psychiatry and Psychology, 10, numbers 1-3 (1970): 22-42. Reprinted, slightly revised, in Ong's Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Ithaca, New York; and London, England: Cornell University Press, 1977: 122-44).

Phillips, Catherine. Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Visual World. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2007.

Phillips, John. The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535-1660. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1973.

Shapiro, Gary. Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Starkey, Kathryn and Horst Wenzel, eds. Visual Culture and the German Middle Ages. New York and Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Steiner, Emily. Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature. Cambridge, England: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2003.

Thorne, Alison. Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare: Looking through Language. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.

Yeo, Richard. Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture. Cambridge, England: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2001.

Authors Website: http://www.d.umn.edu/~tfarrell

Authors Bio:

Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book WALTER ONG'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO CULTURAL STUDIES: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE WORD AND I-THOU COMMUNICATION (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2000; 2nd ed. 2009, forthcoming). The first edition won the 2001 Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology conferred by the Media Ecology Association. For further information about his education and his publications, see his UMD homepage: Click here to visit Dr. Farrell's homepage.

On September 10 and 22, 2009, he discussed Walter Ong's work on the blog radio talk show "Ethics Talk" that is hosted by Hope May in philosophy at Central Michigan University. Each hour-long show has been archived and is available for people who missed the live broadcast to listen to. Here are the website addresses for the two archived shows:

Click here to listen the Technologizing of the Word Interview

Click here to listen the Ramus, Method & The Decay of Dialogue Interview