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This paper maps the connection of Milton and Edison in the late Victorian imagination as examples of geniuses. I argue that their juxtaposition is rooted in the voice hearing etymology of the genius, but more importantly in the notion of what I call the phonographic author. Drawing on nineteenth-century periodicals and books, I will be comparing Edison’s own vision of the phonograph in authoring books and the Victorian popular imagination elaboration on the same, especially in Uzanne’s short story ‘The End of Books’ (1894) while showing Milton’s own role in making such an idea of the phonographic author feasible.

[...]the University of Torontos Centre for Culture and Technology, founded by McLuhan, continues to exist and support McLuhans approach to scholarship. [...]Ongs scholarly home, Saint Louis University, preserves much of Ongs legacy with The Walter J. Ong, S.J., Center for Digital Humanities (https://www.slu.edu/arts-and-sciences/ong-center/). [...]we might be less likely to lean on Postman as a starting point for media scholarship. [...]Postman's scholarly home, New York University, does not preserve or maintain an archive of his works. [...]I summarize scholarship that re-articulates Postman's approach to research and the themes of his research. [...]I will summarize research that develops Postman's major phases of scholarship and connects his work to other scholars. [...]I will offer some directions for future research based on some gaps in scholarship related to Postman. 1. [...]if we are to take up Postman's scholarship, then we would want a sense of Postman's life in the context of the issues he addressed.

Walter J. Ong is well known for his in-depth work in studies of orality and literacy. This article proposes reading Ong in more expansive terms, as a cultural critic with a wide range of knowledge and a deep sense that all things are connected. This conviction of all things’ interrelationship, combined with the sense that, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, all the “world is charged with the grandeur of God,” yielded in Ong insights into a broad array of subjects. Many of these insights grow out of, but are not limited to, his orality–literacy studies.

Farrell's favorite scholar is Walter Ong, an American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and media ecology theorist. He had taken several courses from him and have found much wisdom in his work. Here, he will introduce readers to Ong's life and work, as well as his connections to Marshall McLuhan and James Joyce. He will also mention Maurice B. McNamee, another Jesuit Renaissance specialist, and Hugh Kenner, a Joyce specialist. He will discuss the relationship between Ong and McLuhan, as well as Dr. Eric McLuhan's books on Menippean satire. McLuhan's 1997 book focuses on Joyce's Finnegans Wake, while his 2015 book provides an overview of Menippean satire. Both books offer insights into Joyce's wisdom and the practice of reading Finnegans Wake aloud.

Walter Jackson Ong, SJ, studied cultural change from a humanistic perspective, with a special focus on the role of language and media. In his more than 450 publications, he explored aural and visual communication in all its forms. His explorations enriched communication theory, rhetoric, linguistics, literature, theology, art, psychology, and cultural anthropology. Writing restructures consciousness, he famously observed, and in Orality and Literacy, he mapped the changes in consciousness that characterize shifts from oral to chirographic to print to electronic culture. In the last 25 years of his life, Ong paid special attention to the new electronic culture that now dominates the globe. Ong developed his new hermeneutic out of his formulation of secondary orality, not as a return to the first form of communication but as a later stage that relied on literacy to craft an illusion of orality in electronic communication.

Although Raphael Hythloday holds out for a vision of knowledge subject to a univocal language style, Thomas More's Utopia as a whole envisions knowledge as part of an ongoing dialogue open to a variety of languages and language styles. The philosophy that emerges from this text takes its cue from the commonplace of the theatre of the world, according to which participants do well to speak in accordance with the roles and scenes in which they find themselves. In this preference for a rhetorical philosophy, More in some ways anticipates, mutatis mutandis, the \"relationist\" and deconstructive work of such 20 th -century figures as Walter J. Ong and Jacques Derrida. This article reads Utopia as a text devoted to the reader's formation to participate in this work of open-ended investigation.

To celebrate the Walter J. Ong centennial, this special forum presents essays by six scholars. The essays describe the conditions in which Ong undertook his major work on Ramus, the historical context of the orality/literacy schema, the contemporary relevance of his ideas about digitization, the central themes of his cultural criticism, the relationship between his work and that of Mircea Eliade, and links between Ong and other scholars documented in his letters. These essays portray the man and his ideas as they discuss aspects of his lifelong concern about relationships between the sacred and the secular and about the effects of different modes of communication on being, thought, and culture.

In 1994 Walter Ong offered to the journal Connotations his essay \"Time, Digitization, and Dali's Memory,\" a reflection on Salvador Dali's most famous painting, The Persistence of Memory, which eerily depicts limpid, melting timepieces over a surreal barren landscape. The editors rejected it, judging it to be more philosophical than philological: an \"essay on human time\". They were correct. The essay is a meditation on how time and memory can be an index of their humanity. Ong developed this Dali essay from another unpublished manuscript of the 1990s, his book-length Language as Hermeneutic, which he described as a synthesis of his life's work. In the draft of Language as Hermeneutic, Ong explored how a hermeneutic based upon sound can generate insights into time, memory, and digitization that are obscured by a visually-based hermeneutic. Neither a technophobe nor an alarmist, Ong welcomed digitization, though he was more aware than most of them of the need to temper its vision and to supplement it with an oral hermeneutic more adept at speaking the unspeakable.

Toward the end of his career, Walter Ong mused on hermeneutics in an essay he titled, \"Hermeneutics Forever\" (1995/1999), tellingly published in Oral Tradition. For Ong, interpretation, like so much else, begins in human life and human presence, in what essentially involves an oral process. And interpretation makes that information meaningful: it moves it from information to communication, a distinction he elaborates in an essay published shortly after the one on hermeneutics. He explains why in two different places. First, interpretation becomes necessary because human communication remains open: there is always something more to be said. Second, in the 1996 essay, Ong repeats the growing importance of hermeneutics. Over time people created methods of understanding and methods of interpretation so that mediating technologies might function more smoothly. And over time, these evolved into cultural practices of shared knowledge.

How can intense religious beliefs coexist with pluralism in America today? Examining the role of the religious imagination in contemporary religious practice and in some of the best-known works of American literature from the past fifty years, Postmodern Belief shows how belief for its own sake--a belief absent of doctrine--has become an answer to pluralism in a secular age. Amy Hungerford reveals how imaginative literature and religious practices together allow novelists, poets, and critics to express the formal elements of language in transcendent terms, conferring upon words a religious value independent of meaning.