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Oral Residue in Tudor Prose Style

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Walter J. Ong
Walter J. Ong*
Affiliation:
St. Louis University, St. Louis, Mo.
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Extract

We have recently been growing more aware of the differences between oral cultures and literate cultures. The effects on modes of thought inherent in the successive media of expression—oral speech, analphabetic writing, alphabetic writing, letterpress printing, the electronic media, wired and wireless—have been studied in some detail, and we know something of the effect of (alphabetic) writing on the ability to perform abstract analysis and to exercise individually controlled thinking as against communally controlled thinking.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 80 , Issue 3 , June 1965 , pp. 145 - 154
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1965

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References

1 The present study grows in part from work made possible by a travel grant from the Penrose Fund of the American Philosophical Society, for which the author is grateful. Part of this study was presented as a paper at the 1963 Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association of America.

For the emergence of literature out of preliterate oral performance, see the massive work of H. Munro Chadwick and Nora Kershaw Chadwick, The Growth of Literature, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Eng.: University Press, 1932–40). In The Singer of Tales, Harvard Studies in Comp. Lit., 1924 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960), Albert B. Lord follows up the work of Milman Parry on Yugoslavian singers of epic tales and brings the results to bear on Homer, Beowulf, and other epics, showing conclusively that not only is the oral epic independent of literacy but that it is also dependent on illiteracy—if an individual knows how to read, at least in twentieth-century fashion, he cannot render the truly oral form. In his brilliant Preface to Pialo (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), Eric A. Havelock traces the emergence of the Greek philosophical mind to the shift from an oral (Homeric) culture to alphabetization.

2 See J. C. Carothers, “Culture, Psychology, and the Written Word,” Psychiatry, xxii (Nov. 1959), 307–320, and the many studies cited there; Marvin K. Opler, Culture, Psychiatry, and Human Values (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C Thomas, 1956); Gilbert Durand, Les Structures anthropologiques de l'imaginaire: introduction à l'archétypologie (Grenoble: Imprimerie Allier; Paris: Presses univs. de France, 1960).

3 European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. from the German by Willard Trask, Bollingen Series, xxxvi (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953), p. 315.

4 I borrow this term from Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1962), pp. 24, 54, 58, etc.

5 Morris W. Croll's principal studies, soon to appear in collected form, are well known: “Introduction: The Sources of the Euphuistic Rhetoric,” pp. xv–lxiv in John Lyly, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, Euphues and His England, ed. Morris William Croll and Harry Clemons (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1916); “The Cadence of English Oratorical Prose,” SP, xvi (1919), 1–55; “ ‘Attic Prose’ in the Seventeenth Century,” SP, xviii (1921), 79–128; “Attic Prose: Lipsius, Montaigne, Bacon,” Schelling Anniversary Papers by his [Felix Emmanuel Schelling's] former students (New York: Century Co., 1923); “Muret and the History of Attic Prose,” PMLA, xxxix (1924), 234–309; “The Baroque Style in Prose,” in Studies in English Philology: A Miscellany in Honor of Frederick Klaeber, ed. by Kemp Malone and Martin Ruud (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1929). See also George Williamson, The Senecan Amble (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1951).

6 See Richard McKeon, “Rhetoric in the Middle Ages,” Speculum, xvii (1942), 28–29; cf. Wilbur Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700 (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1956), pp. 4–6, 40, 275–276, etc.

7 See Sister Mary Humiliata, “Standards of Taste Advocated for Feminine Letter Writing, 1640–1797,” HLQ, xiii (1950), 261–277, and references there cited, pp. 261–262.

8 R. R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries (Cambridge, Eng.: University Press, 1958), p. 273.

9 Under the heading “Delectarunt,” in Erasmus' De copia verborum ac rerum commentarius primus … secundus [table of contents, De copia verborum ac rerum libri duo], Lib. i, cap. xxxiii, in his Opera omnia (Leyden, 1703–06), i, cols. 23–30.

10 See the sources in T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1944), i, 75.

11 William Roper, The Lyfe of Sir Thomas More, Knighte, ed. by Elsie Vaughan Hitchcock, EETS, O.S., No. 197 (London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford Univ. Press, 1935), p. 5.

12 Lord, The Singer of Tales, pp. 130–131.

13 “For Metaphysicks, I say that Aristotles Metaphysicks is the most impertinent Booke (sit venia) in all his works; indeed, a rapsodie of Logicali scraps.”—[Thomas Barlow?], ‘A Library for Younger Schollers’ Compiled by an English Scholar-Priest about 1655, ed. by Alma DeJordy and Harris Francis Fletcher, Ill. Studies in Lang. and Lit., Vol. xlviii (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1961), 4. This assertion clearly echoes Ramus' accusation that Aristotle's metaphysics was only theology sieved through dialectic (or logic—the two terms were synonymous for Ramus). See Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), p. 190.

14 Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries, pp. 271–275, 295–301.

15 Sister Joan Marie Lechner, O.S.U., Renaissance Concepts of the Commonplaces (New York: Pageant Press, 1962), pp. 65–131, and passim.

16 Torsten Petersson, Cicero: A Biography (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1920), pp. 92–94.

17 Quintilian, The Institutio Oratoria … with an English translation by H. E. Butler, ii. 4. 30–32, Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann, 1920), i, 239–241; Petersson, Cicero, pp. 92–93.

18 Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, p. 116.

19 Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700, pp. 138–146.

20 Lord, The Singer of Tales, p. 30.

21 Richard Rainolde, The Foundation of Rhetorike (1563), ed. Francis R. Johnson (New York: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1945), fols. xlr–xliiiv.

22 See Donald A. Stauffer, English Biography before 1700 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1930), pp. 3–32.

23 Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, pp. 85–91.

24 John Lyly, Euphues, ed. Croll and Clemons, pp. 65–66.

25 William A. Ringler, Jr, “The Immediate Source of Euphuism,” PMLA, liii (1938), 678–686.

26 Baldwin, William Shakspere's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, pp. 349, 394–395, 519, etc., cites school statutes and British editions of these two works. Of course, the far more numerous Continental editions were also known to schoolmasters in the British isles, as can be seen from inscriptions in surviving copies today.

27 See Ioannes Ravisius Textor, Specimen epithetorum (Paris: Henricus Stephanus, 1518)—the second edition (Paris: Reginaldus Chauldiere, 1524), published posthumously under the editorship of Ioannes' brother Iacobus, and the many subsequent editions were entitled Epitheta. …

28 Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour, ed. Henry Herbert Stephen Croft (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, and Co., 1883), i, 4, 6 (Book i, Chap. i), 60 (Book i, Chap. x).