Graham Furniss, Orality: The power of the spoken word

Extract

Graham Furniss, Orality: The power of the spoken word. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Pp. vii, 184. Hb $75.00.

Most books written on the subject of orality and literacy are constructed upon an edifice of binary oppositions between the “oral” and the “written” traditions – a typology of supposed differences between the “primitive” or “preliterate” and “civilized” or “modern” cultures. In Orality: The power of the spoken word, Graham Furniss deliberately sets out to flatten this Great Divide that has characterized works of scholars such as Marshall McLuhan and his longtime student Walter J. Ong. On the one hand, there are people like McLuhan who nurse a certain nostalgia for the “premodern” era, arguing that by gaining literacy, society in a sense loses its expressive and sensory existence as a result of the dislocation caused by modern technology. On the other hand, scholars such as Ong view the written text as being in many ways a form of representation superior to the oral because the written word asserts itself (its truth or falsehood) with finality and it is thus a more credible way to communicate. Moreover, Ong sees the written text as having object permanence; it can therefore be easily “re-called” to memory by the reader (Ong 1982:31). Thus, he would argue that the written text occupies a higher level than the oral on the logos hierarchy.