Orality and Literacy II: Clarifying the Critique of Dunn

One of the benefits of writing a blog is that one is able to clarify earlier posts in the light of listening to the way that they have been read. Before beginning my series on Orality and Literacy, I was aware of the dangers of being misread, and in my first post I attempted to lay down a few markers, in particular aiming to make clear that I was not issuing any kind of challenge to the essential contrast between our literate culture and the oral culture of antiquity. It is, of course, in the nature of such posts that readers are tempted to skip over the position markers and infer a perspective more radical than the one the author actually holds. It is also important to bear in mind the sketch-like nature of blog posts, what I called "snapshots" of my thinking at a given moment.

There is actually little I disagree with in April DeConick's post on The Forbidden Gospels Blog, What is Orality? and, as always, I am grateful to April for taking the time to write with her characteristic fervour. As I wrote in comments over on her blog, though, the point of my post was to talk about the way in which we are inclined to caricature our own literate culture, to exaggerate the contrasts for rhetorical effect. I am in part being playful here, looking at how Dunn's conceptualization of our culture is in fact falling short -- I have not in this initial post even begun to deal with the ancient world. (April does not mention Dunn in her response but instead implies that my comments were targeted more broadly as an attempt to challenge contemporary work on orality in the ancient world.) It may take a few more posts in my series before my thinking on this is as clearly articulated as I would like, but let me mention here one element that I hope to return to, that we need to take seriously "secondary orality" in our culture (the term is, of course, Walter Ong's; cf. Loren Rosson's anticipation of the topic on The Busybody).

Where Dunn uses the interesting analogy of the computer's "default setting", he gives examples from word-processing, an important part of that heavily literate academic sub-culture that many of us live and breathe. But the computer could also provide a means of illustrating elements of secondary orality. The computer is now a telephone, a radio, a television and more. One of the most exciting challenges to us as early twenty-first scholars of antiquity is the exploration of comparisons and contrasts with the primary orality of the period we are studying.