Epiphany

So I know that everyone always leaves their classes pondering the question, When am I ever going to use this?

Well, I have learned that what we are learning about memory and memory palaces in oral traditions really can be applied to not only the real world, but also other classes to allow for success.

While memorizing my lines for "The Winter's Tale" by William Shakespeare, I found it much easier to learn them not when we were all sitting around a table stoically reciting the same thing over and over. Instead, with the help of gestures and movements and places visited during the scene, I found it much easier to retain the required information. For that reason, I wanted to extend a big thank you out to you Professor Sexson for teaching me the ways of the memory palace.

More Important Quotes From Ong

"Orality needs to produce and is destined to produce writing." p. 14


"Saussure takes the view that writing simply represents spoken language in visible form." p. 17


"Oral poets do not normally work from verbatim memorization of their verse." p. 21


"The meaning of the Greed term 'rhapsodize'...'to stitch song together'...became ominous: Homer stitched together prefabricated parts. Instead of a creator, you had an assembly-line worker." p. 22


"There was no use denying the now known fact that the Homeric poems valued and somehow made capital of what later readers had been trained inprinciple to disvalue, namely, the set phrase, the formula, the expected qualifier - to put it more bluntly, the cliche." p. 23

The Residue of Words

"Written words are residue. Oral tradition has no such residue or deposit. When an often-told oral story is not actually being told, all that exists of it its the potential in certain human beings to tell it." p. 11 in Ong's Orality and Literacy

Important Thoughts From Ong

"The orality treated here is primary orality, that of persons totally unfamiliar with writing." p. 6


"The basic orality of language is permanent." p. 7


"A grapholect is a transdialectal language formed by deep commitment to writing." p. 8


"Oral expression can exist and mostly has existed without any writing at all, writing never without orality." p. 8


"As noted above, I style the orality of a culture totally untouched by any knowledge of writing or print, 'primary orality'. It is 'primary' by contrast with the 'secondary orality' of present-day high-technology culture, in shich a new orality is sustained by telephone, radio, television, and other electroinc devices that depend for their existence and functioning on writing and print." p. 11

Gossip!!!

Wheelless Automobile

"Thinking of oral tradition or a heritage of oral performance, genres and styles as 'oral literatre' is rather like thinking of horses as automobiles without wheels. You can, of course, undertake to do this. Imagine writing a treatise on horses (for people who have seen a horse) which starts with the concept not of horse but of 'automobile' built on the readers' direct experience of automobiles. It proceeds to discourse on horses by always referring to them as 'wheelless automobiles', explaining to highly autmobilized readers who have never seen a horse all the points of difference in an effort to excise all idea of 'automobile' out of the concept 'wheelless automobile' so as to invest the term with a purely equine meaning. Instead of wheels, the wheelless automobiles have enlarged toenails called hooves; instead of headlights or perhaps rear-vision mirrors, eyes; instead of a coat of lacquer, something called hair; instead of gasoline for fuel, hay, and so on. In the end horses are only what they are not." p. 12

Kane

"No longer constrained by the checks and balances of survival in nature, populations are now controlled by social class. A class system arises out of the necessitites of agriculture. For agriculture to work, you need to have a concept of property. For a concept of property to work, you need to have a state. For a state to work, you need to have armies to defend it. Consequently, developed agricultural societies evolve a new mythology featuring three classes of deities-deities who stand respectively for the functions of priest, farmer, and warrior." The Art of Memory p. 21-22