Saturday, August 26, 2017

Oral and literate cultures

I am reading a book called Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word by Fr. Walter Ong, now deceased, who was the pioneer in studies of how textuality -- literacy -- changed human society and thinking.  Part of his thesis is that the oral and illiterate mentality is simply different, and almost impossible to understand by minds formed under a literate society, because basic thinking is different -- not better or worse, just different:
- an oral culture simply does not deal in such items as geometrical figures, abstract categorization, formally logical reasoning processes, definitions, or even comprehensive descriptions, or articulated self-analysis, all of which derive not simply from thought itself but from text-formed thought.
- Oral cultures tend to use concepts in situational, operational frames of reference that are minimally abstract in the sense that they remain close to the living human lifeworld. There is a considerable literature bearing on this phenomenon. Havelock (1978a) has shown that pre-Socratic Greeks thought of justice in operational rather than formally conceptualized ways and the late Anne Amory Parry (1973) made much the same point about the epithet amymon applied by Homer to Aegisthus: the epithet means not 'blameless', a tidy abstraction with which literates have translated the term, but 'beautiful-in-the-way-a-warrior-ready-to-fight-is-beautiful'.
It is a fascinating read. 
 


5 comments:

  1. I met Fr. Ong just over forty years ago, when he lectured at my university. I wish that I could remember what the lecture was on. Was A.A. Parry related to Milman Parry?

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  2. Hi George! It was probably something in this area. He was also a student of Marshall McLuhan I believe so maybe something there too. And Fr. Ong does say Milman's son was Adam who continued his father's work at Berkeley I think, but unfortunately passed away when he was still young. I haven't seen an A.A. Parry mentioned.

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  3. In his memoir of academic life , Alvin Kernan writes that Adam Parry, traveling in Europe, tried to merge onto a highway ahead of a truck. The engine of his motorcycle suddenly failed, and that was the end of him.

    In the Abridged Lexicon (but whether this is the middle Liddell or the little Liddell, I'm not sure), Liddell and Scott indeed give amumon as blameless and leave it at that. In the unabridged (the great Scott), they go on to say "in Hom. epith. of all men and women distinguished by rank, exploits, or beauty, yet without any moral reference, so that in Od. I, 29 it is given even to Aegisthus...". Autenrieth's and Cunliffe's Homeric dictionaries make the same point.

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  4. George, re: the Parrys, which I didn't understand that Anne Armoy Parry (in my original post) was the A.A. Parry to which you referred. Anne was a classicist as well, married to Adam and they both were at Yale. They both tragically died in that motocycle accident in 1971.

    Milman, father of Adam, died from a gunshot in 1935, which may have been self caused according to Wikipedia.) A terribly sad family tree.

    And I appreciate your references to definitional sources in Homer. Would that I had an education that would enable me to know in that depth. Mine was (and still is) far more scattered.

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  5. I wish my education are what you perhaps imagine that it is. "Scattered" is not a bad word for it.

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