Culture, Art and Technology

Memento on library reserves – password CG1C

Orality and Literacy

    • clue to structure of Proust, how the brain learned to read is the central question of part 1

Walter Ong
    • significant influence in topic of oral and literary cultures
    • catholic/Jesuit scholar of literature
    • 1952 published Orality and Literacy: the technologizing of the Word ( what happened to human culture and our ideas about ourselves when writing was invented, what did this all do to our sense of who we are and how we manipulated information?
    • Writing itself was a technology and world changing

Primacy of Orality
    • Oral cultures are dominant over literary cultures numerically

Characteristics of oral culture
    • Ong points out many, 1 is that words disappear as soon as they are uttered unlike the written word, it disappears as its made and has a different relationship to time and space than writing
    • Roughly speaking, there are 3 different kinds of scripts:
        o Logographic-symbols represent words has (something like Chinese) most characters
        o Syllabic system – every character represents a syllable (middle) like Sumerian
        o Alphabetic script – breaks down symbols to a certain sound (least characters)

Logosyllabic
    • “I love CAT”

Symbolic Representation
    • “3 year old who knew about the fish symbol”

Orality versus Literacy
    • distance between receivers can differ tremendously, when reading your speaking with the author but the space/time between you two can be vast

Secondary Orality
    • books at dinner table instead of t.v. today

Advertising
    • using strategies of orality to get the message across (PC vs. Mac ( memorable stereotypes)

Technologizing the Word II

Proust and the Squid/ “Orality and Literacy”
    • wolf claims that different areas of the brain correlate with different types of scripts
    • based on the difference between readers of Chinese and English
    •... [continues]

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