Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word

“New Accents is intended as a positive response to the initiative offered by such a situation. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change, to stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study.”

The editor lays out the general goals of the New Accents series, setting a positive tone and establishing the attitude of innovation and advancement at the heart of the collection. This Preface to the series acts as a promotion and justification of any unconventional proposals and encourages the reader to oppose conservatism in academia.

“The subject of this book is the differences between orality and literacy. Or, rather, since readers of this or any book by definition are acquainted with literate culture from the inside, the subject is, first, thought and its verbal expression in oral culture, which is strange and at times bizarre to us, and, second, literate thought and expression in terms of their emergence from and relation to orality.”

Ong’s Introduction provides a simple overview of the book’s subject, introducing key concepts in simple and accessible language. Ong acknowledges the readers’ potential biases by himself describing the alternative perspective as ‘bizarre,’ and in doing so he encourages alignment with his perspectives and conveys the importance of moving beyond preconceived notions about this topic.

“Almost all the work thus far contrasting oral cultures and chirographic cultures has contrasted orality with alphabetic writing rather than with other writing systems (cuneiform, Chinese characters, the Japanese syllabary, Mayan script and so on) and has been concerned with the alphabet as used in the west (the alphabet is also at home in the east, as in India, Southeast Asia or Korea). Here discussion will follow the major lines of extant scholarship, although some attention will also be given, at relevant points, to scripts other than the alphabet and to cultures other than just those of the west.”

Ong notes the limited Anglo-American focus of his work as a major flaw, but justifies it as the result of a lack of internationally focused prior scholarship. This defangs potential criticism of this aspect of the work and mitigates the potential ramifications of the bias by drawing awareness to it in advance.