Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word

Orality-literacy research is far from complete, and further study into the topic promises to yield valuable revelations in a number of fields. Better understanding orality and the transition to literacy will provide information on the present as well as the past. In this chapter, Ong references Terrence Hawkes’s (1977) suggestions of potential avenues for further research and development across and beyond the schools of literacy and philosophy.

Extant studies into the psychodynamics and social impact of the orality-literacy shift are far from exhaustive in the field of literary studies. The relationship between literature and the residual orality that was prominent until the Romantic Movement has yet to be examined in depth. The primacy of the art of rhetoric in classical education has undoubtedly influenced Western literary traditions, but although the broad strokes of this influence have been traced in this book, there is much still to be analyzed. In particular, the influence of women writers on the creation of the novel genre and the subsequent shift away from orality has yet to be researched.