Tenaciousness of orality

As the paradoxical relationships of orality and literacy in rhetoric and Learned Latin suggest, the transition from orality to literacy was slow (Ong 1967b, pp. 53-87; 1971, pp. 23-48). The Middle Ages used texts far more than ancient Greece and Rome, teachers lectured on texts in the universities, and yet never tested knowledge or intellectual prowess by writing, but always by oral dispute - a practice continued in diminishing ways into the nineteenth century and today still surviving vestigially in the defense of the doctoral dissertation in the fewer and fewer places where this is practiced. Though Renaissance humanism invented modern textual scholarship and presided over the development of letterpress printing, it also harkened back to antiquity and thereby gave new life to orality. English style in the Tudor period (Ong 1971, pp.23-47) and even much later carried heavy oral residue in its use of epithets, balance, antithesis, formulary structures, and commonplace materials. And so with western European literacy styles generally.

In western classical antiquity, it was taken for granted that a written text of any worth was meant to be and deserved to be read aloud, and the practice of reading texts aloud continued, quite commonly with many variations, through the nineteenth century (Balogh 1926). This practice strongly influenced literary style from antiquity until rather recent times (Balogh 1926; Crosby 1936; Nelson 1976-7; Ahern 1982). Still yearning for the old orality, the nineteenth century developed 'elocution' contests, which tried to repristinate printed texts, using careful artistry to memorize the texts verbatim and recite them so that they would sound like extempore oral productions (Howell 1971, pp. 144-256). Dickens read selections from his novels on the orator's platform. The famous McGuffey's Readers, published in the United States in some 120 million copies between 1836 and 1920, were designed as remedial readers to improve not the reading for comprehension which we idealize today, but oral, declamatory reading. The McGuffey's specialized in passages from sound-conscious literature concerned with great heroes ( heavy oral characters). They provided endless oral pronunciation and breathing drills (Lynn 1973, pp. 16,20).

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