ONG STUDY

Near the end of the semester, I will invite you to select and present on a single chapter out of Walter Ong’s Rhetoric, Romance and Technology that best reflects what you feel most confident about in challenging and furthering historical study. In other words, in a brief but polished presentation (10-12 minutes) you will have the opportunity to educate your classmates on how you would build on and away from Ong’s topics or methods based on what you have learned in our course. Although the various chapters in Ong’s text focus on different periods or epistemes, Ong’s methodology is rooted in his years of writing (and studying) Modern histories—which is to say, rooted in those states of mind that emerged because of or in spite of tracing epistemological developments from the Middle Ages through the Enlightenment. So, you might discuss how some of your other “secondary” readings compel you to think differently, or outline for us the historical questions you have found to be more useful than others. You might even demonstrate the methods or emergent tools that you think make new kinds of study more viable on a particular topic or question Ong raises.

Whatever you do, be sure to articulate what you understand as much as what you would like to change about his methodology; this will help you to more confidently express how your way of study both adds to and detracts from what you think the historical period offers us. Ideally, your presentation would help us understand Ong’s historical periods in a more nuanced way. I will ask you to prepare a discussion tool that helps us follow along during the presentation and ask good questions afterwards, format and content to be determined by you.

(Added on 3/28) Here is the schedule, resulting from your chapter selections:

Tuesday 4/16

• our common discussion of "Preface" and Chapter 1
• Molly on Chapter 6
• Bret on Chapter 7
• Josh on Chapter 8

Thursday 4/18

• Martha on Chapter 11
• Christine on Chapter 12
• Logan on Chapter 13