Interesting quotes I've found while working on the inventory July 28:

From a review of Ong's work in the Globe-Democrat, May 31-June 1, 1975

"He was a McLuhanist before McLuhan" (1F).

From Paul Lippert's dissertation, "Detechnologizing the Study of the Word: Method and Thought of Walter Jackson Ong." New York University, 1990

"His analysis always moves from the text back to its source in a living consciousness, then out into the culture that sustains that consciousness, and then, as his studies mature, to the technological structures that mediate that culture's relation to the material world" (227).

"In his emphasis on the word's primary existence as sound and its relation to both time and thought, set as it is in the evolution of history, it can also be seen that, for Ong, no system of thought is immune to history. Even technologized methods of inquiry represent but a moment in a dialogue. Understanding can best be approached through an appreciation of the open quality of dialogue itself, which cannot be systematized or technologized in any close way. Rather than looking at objects from a fixed point of view, as we are encouraged to do from a technologized word, Ong urges methods of inquiry that are more like listening, in that they are sensitive to the living presence behind all discourse, engaged as it is in evolving dialogue of history" (236-37).