Orality and Literacy

A comprehensive masterwork in the cultural anthropology of communication and human consciousness, this seminal work on orality and literacy has been a touchstone for students and scholars in the field for thirty years. A landmark work when first published in 1982, Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy not only pursued Ong’s basic premise that we are shaped by our technologies, but also exhibited his formidable knowledge of history, theology, and literature in tracing how writing helped shape the western psyche. In this anniversary edition, which includes two new essays exploring Ong’s theories in the context of new media, John Hartley situates Ong within recent intellectual history while also highlighting his relevance to contemporary studies of culture, literature and media as well as psychology, education, sociology.