Rhetoric Review Mar 1998

The return of the addressed: Rhetoric, reading, and resonance

Audrey M. Van Mersbergen University of Minnesota, Duluth

Abstract

In past several decades, much talk about orality and literacy has appeared in academic circles. Havelock (Preface to Plato and The Muse Learns to Write), Ong (The Presence of Word, Orality and Literacy), Jamieson (Eloquence in an Electronic Age) and McLuhan (The Gutenberg Galaxy) write of changes in both and consciousness associated with either or modality of communication. They write of distinctions between oral culture and oral state of mind, and literate culture and literate state of mind. However, distinction between orality and literacy itself is never directly called into question. The categories have been set and subsequent scholarly discourses pivot on these platforms. I offer an alternative discourse and argue that categories of orality and literacy are not as definitive as Havelock, Ong, Jamieson, and McLuhan would have us believe. While I agree that shifts in modalities of discourse have occurred from tales of Homer to texts of Hegel to technological trends of Hollywood, human experience does not sustain these demarcations. The sensating body experiences a simultaneity of sound, vision, and tactility, even if a particular discursive modality favors speech, print, or electronic pixels. The orality-literacy schism does not acknowledge this simultaneity. In fact, it further compartmentalizes human experience by separating it into and Havelock writes that early Greek mentality, because it was oral, was not capable of or thought (xi), and it was not until alphabetization that eye supplanted ear as chief organ (vii). For Havelock, the and sensual is coupled with oral culture while the and metaphysical is coupled with literate culture. I argue in this paper that orality-literacy dichotomy is fallacious and that notions of either being concrete or being abstract cannot be anchored in it. Furthermore, I argue that it is rhetorical capability of language, not its capacity for production or literal production, that generates either the concrete or the abstract. More specifically, I explore notion that language, whether produced orally through mouth or literally through mind will tend to be more or less euphonic, more or less dramatistic, or more or less imagistic. In short, degrees of euphony, drama, and image will be in direct proportion to degree of rhetoricity in any given discourse. With this

Journal
Rhetoric Review
Published
1998-03-01
DOI
10.1080/07350199809389094
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Topics
rhetorical criticism discourse analysis literacy studies editorial matter
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