This collection of essays by Walter J. Ong focuses on the complex and dynamic relationship between verbal performance and cultural evolution. By studying the history of rhetoric and related arts from classical antiquity through the age of romanticism to the modern period, Ong both illuminates the past and helps explain late-twentieth-century modes of expression. Elegantly written and wide ranging, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology traces the evolution of devices used to store, retrieve, and communicate knowledge. Ong discusses diverse topics including memory as art, associationist critical theory, the close relationship between romanticism and technology, and the popular culture of the 1970s. This book also contains essays about Tudor writings in English on rhetoric and literary theory, the study of Latin as a Renaissance puberty rite, Ramism in the classroom and in commerce, Jonathan Swift's notion of the mind, and John Stuart Mill's politics.

A collection of essays examining the role of technology in redefining rhetoric, writing, and 'the human.'

Walter Ong pioneered the study of how orality and literacy mutually enrich each other in the evolution of human consciousness, arguing that verbal communication moves from orality to literacy and on to what he has termed the "secondary orality" of radio and television. The original essays in this volume explore the implications of Ong's work across the diverse fields of cultural history, literary theory, theology, philosophy, and anthropology. These scholars maintain that Ong's view of orality not only changes our readings of ancient and medieval texts, but that it also changes our understanding of the differing epistemologies of oral and literate cultures and of the coexistence of the oral and literate within a given culture.