We’re interested in the intersection between the spoken word and the written word.
Find the original article and much more at: https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/biography/walter-j-ong.
Biography
Throughout his career, Walter Jackson Ong concerned himself with the interrelationships between technologies of communication and changes in human consciousness. He was born on November 30, 1912, in Kansas City, Missouri, the son of Walter Jackson Ong and Blanche Eugenia (Mense) Ong. He studied at Rockhurst College, a small Catholic school in Kansas City run by the Jesuit Order. After receiving his B.A. from Rockhurst in 1933, he spent two years in newspaper and business positions before entering the Missouri Province of the Society of Jesus in 1935. He then went through the traditional course of studies for Jesuits, spending two years in a novitiate where he studied Latin and Greek and where he underwent rigorous ascetic training, including a thirty-day retreat based on the sixteenth century Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola.
In the late 1930’s, Ong studied philosophy at Saint Louis University, a Jesuit institution since 1828 and one with which he became closely associated. He received his Ph.L. (licentiate in philosophy) in 1940 and his M.A. in 1941. During regency, a period of practice teaching for Jesuit scholastics, he was an instructor for two years in English and French at Regis College in Denver. In 1944, he began his theological training at Saint Louis University, and during his first three years of studies, he also taught English. He was ordained a priest in 1946, and after another year of theology he received his S.T.L. (licentiate in sacred theology).
In the early 1950’s, Ong studied at Harvard University, where he came under the influence of Perry Miller and began his important work on the logician Petrus Ramus. This sixteenth century educational reformer made Ong aware of the revolutionary shift in sensibility brought about by the development of typography. Ramus simplified and modernized the old logic of Aristotle by concentrating on logic’s practical use as an instrument of discovery rather than as a tool of scholastic disputation. Ong used Ramism to illustrate the transformation that brought Western societies to react to words less as sounds and more as items in space, less as parts of a temporally successive oral argument and more as elements in a printed pattern.
This is complex and dense, so we’ve broken it into sections. More next Monday.