Background

Walter Ong was born on November 30, 1912, in Kansas City, Missouri.

Education

Walter Ong graduated from Rockhurst High School in 1929. He studied Latin at Rockhurst College, where he graduated in 1933 with a Bachelor of Arts. Then he earned a Master of Arts in English in 1941 and the degrees Licentiate of Philosophy and Licentiate of Sacred Theology from Saint Louis University. Finally, in 1955, Ong received a Doctor of Philosophy in English from Harvard University.

Career

Ordained a priest in 1946, Walter Ong spent his career in academia, although he considered himself a priest rather than an educator. He joined the faculty at Saint Louis University in 1953 and remained there throughout his career, retiring as professor emeritus in 1984.

Moreover, Walter Ong was a writer. Among his books are In the Human Grain: Further Explorations of Contemporary Culture, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture, Hopkins, the Self, and God, and An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry.

Achievements

• Walter Ong is best known as an educator and writer. He taught at Saint Louis University for more than thirty years and rose to the position of professor emeritus. As the author or editor of almost a dozen books, he received the most acclaim for his 1982 work, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World. Besides, in 1963, the French government dubbing Ong a knight, Chevalier de l'Ordre des Palmes académiques, for his work on Ramus. He also was made a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Interfaces of the Word

    (Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, linguistics, phen...)

    1977
  • Faith and Contexts

    (It collects 13 writings of the distinguished Jesuit schol...)

    1992
  • Hopkins, the Self, and God

    (In these studies, Professor Ong explores some previously ...)

    1986
  • Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue

    (Renaissance logician, philosopher, humanist, and teacher,...)

    1958
  • An Ong Reader

    (This collection puts together the writings of Walter Ong,...)

    2002
  • Orality and Literacy

    (Analyzes the differences in consciousness between oral an...)

    1982
  • Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology

    (This collection of essays by Walter Ong focuses on the co...)

    1971
  • Frontiers in American Catholicism 1957
  • Ramus and Talon Inventory 1958
  • American Catholic Crossroads 1959
  • The Barbarian Within 1962
  • In the Human Grain 1967

Views

Walter Ong's mentor, Marshall McLuhan, influenced his interest in the history of language, so his research and writings also can be seen as an extension of McLuhan's work. He studied the differences in pre-literate and literate societies, the impacts of computerization, mass electronic media, and the Internet on people's language education.

Ong founded that societies exercising an oral tradition valued their elders as a link to their past. They experienced stronger communal bonds, while in a literate society, a community's members become more individualistic and isolated from the originators of written texts. The invention of the Internet led to the boundaries between interior thought and external reality, which became more indistinct.

Quotations: "Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form. More than any other, single invention writing has transformed human consciousness."

Membership

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  Society of Jesus , Italy

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  Alpha Delta Gamma , United States

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  Walter Ong became the president of the Modern Language Association in 1978.

  Modern Language Association , United States

• Walter Ong became the president of the Milton Society of America in 1967.

  Milton Society of America , United States

Interests

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Herbert Marshall McLuhan