Jack Goody, an anthropologist, Eric Havelock, a classicist, and Walter Ong, a scholar and theorist of rhetoric, are among the figures who have explored what Goody has taken to calling \u201cthe literacy hypothesis.\u201d\u00a0 They argue that the development of writing alters the way we relate to language, how we use it, and how we conceptualize it.\u00a0 This line of reflection (other key figures include Milman Parry, Albert Lord, Marshall McLuhan, David Olson, and John Foley) suggests, at the very least, that how literature functions and therefore how it means (which isn\u2019t the same thing as saying \u201cwhat\u201d it means) is in part a matter of how writing as a particular modality of language operates under different historical and social and technological conditions.\u00a0 And this in turn suggests that textuality may be less an ahistorical category and more a set of historically conditioned practices.<\/p>\n
For those of us who study literature and rhetoric, Ong\u2019s exploration of the literacy hypothesis in\u00a0Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word<\/em> is still the central text.\u00a0 In it, Ong explores how the practice of writing (the dynamics of literacy) overtakes, even subjugates, and alters, the cognitive and cultural styles based in orality.\u00a0 Ong\u2019s work has been read as setting up a dichotomy\u2014Orality vs. Literacy.\u00a0 But a more accurate reading, I\u2019d suggest, is that Ong posits this dichotomy in order to bring the significance of the Oral\u2014as something related to but also different from the Literate\u2014into view.\u00a0 In any case, for the study of modern literature what matters is not the dichotomy, not Orality vs. Literacy, but rather the dialectic of Speaking and Writing which the emergence of Literacy necessarily creates.\u00a0 What matters, that is, is not simply how Orality and Literacy may support different cognitive styles and cultural practices but rather how our experience of Literacy is entangled with our experiences of speech. \u00a0The way we imagine the nature of writing as a medium is necessarily in part an imagining of writing not in isolation from speech but in relationship to it.\u00a0 How writers variously enact and exploit this dialectical relationship of writing to speaking matters, I\u2019d suggest, for our critical and analytical work.<\/p>\n The several pieces gathered in this section are provisional attempts to engage this question, by considering a possible point of intersection between the insights of those exploring \u201cthe literacy hypothesis,\u201d suggestions about the nature of writing as a medium advanced by the linguists Josef Vachek and Roy Harris, recent directions in editorial theory (the work of Jerome McGann and others), and the reflections on the historical and cognitive dynamics of media and mediation in Friedrich Kittler\u2019s work (most particularly the introductory chapter to\u00a0Gramophone, Film, Typewriter)<\/em>.<\/p>\n (I should add that the initial three pieces posted here, written variously 8-10 years ago, predate my reading of Kittler.\u00a0 How Kittler might contribute to this approach is touched on in the text of the talk on Kerouac posted in that section of this site.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jack Goody, an anthropologist, Eric Havelock, a classicist, and Walter Ong, a scholar and theorist of rhetoric, are among the figures who have explored what Goody has taken to calling \u201cthe literacy hypothesis.\u201d\u00a0 They argue that the development of writing alters the way we relate to language, how we use it, and how we conceptualize … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2326,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-29","page","type-page","status-publish"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tahunt.com\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/29","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tahunt.com\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tahunt.com\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tahunt.com\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2326"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tahunt.com\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/tahunt.com\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/29\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":94,"href":"https:\/\/tahunt.com\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/29\/revisions\/94"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tahunt.com\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}