Walter J. Ong (November 30, 1912 – August 12, 2003) is an educator, academic, and linguist known for his work in Renaissance literary and intellectual history and in contemporary culture as well as for his more wide-ranging studies on the evolution of consciousness.

His best known work, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, reviews the transit from and oral culture to a written culture, that is to the use of the technologies of written words for communication. Writing is described as a technology that must be laboriously learned, and which effects the first transformation of human thought from the world of simply sound to the world of sight. This transition has implications for structuralism, deconstruction, speech-act and reader-response theory, the teaching of reading and writing skills to males and to women, social studies, biblical studies, philosophy, and cultural history generally.

See also: secondary orality.

Ong received a bachelor of arts degree from Latin at Rockhurst College. He worked in printing and publishing prior entering the Society of Jesus in 1935. He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1946. Ong earned a master's degree in English at Saint Louis University. His thesis was supervised by communication theorist Marshall McLuhan. Ong earned a licentiate in philosophy and a licentiate in sacred theology from Saint Louis University. After earning his doctorate degree in English at Harvard University in 1955, Ong returned to Saint Louis University, where he would teach for the next 36 years. Ong was elected president of the 30,000-member Modern Language Association of America http://www.mla.org/ in 1978.

Contents

1 Publications 1.1 Lectures 1.2 Books 2 External links

Publications

Lectures

• 1985 Wolfson College Lectures at Oxford University, Opening Lecture, "Writing Is a Technology That Transforms Thought." In The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, ed. Gerd Baumann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).
• The Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto, Hopkins, the Self and God (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1986).
• The Terry Lectures at Yale University, The Presence of the Word (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967) Other Terry lecturers have included John Dewey, Erich Fromm, Charles Hartshorne, Carl Gustaf Jung, Jacques Maritain, George Gaylord Simpson, and Paul Tillich.
• The Cornell University Messenger Lectures on the Evolution of Civilization, Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1981)

Books

• Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Routledge, 1982) has been translated into 12 languages.
• Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1971) was a Scholar's Library selection for the Modern Language Association Book Club.

External links

• Walter J. Ong Project - digital archives Saint Louis University http://www.slu.edu/colleges/AS/ENG/ong/
• Remembering Walter Ong http://www.rememberingwalterong.com/