In this paper, which was later expanded and published in PMLA<\/i> and became the most widely-read article in Ong\u2019s body of work, Ong examines various aspects of a key difference between forms of communication:\u00a0 the spoken word exists in an actual present, but the written word almost never does.<\/p>\n
The act of writing requires a certain withdrawal.\u00a0 A writer working on a book that may be read by thousands of people is usually alone.\u00a0 But she or he is imagining an audience, Ong says.\u00a0 That is one sense in which a writer\u2019s audience is always a construct.\u00a0 The other is that readers must ficitionalize themselves to meet the writer\u2019s projection of them.\u00a0 Ong traces how such “fictionalizing” has accompanied the development of literary genres.\u00a0 Written narrative was originally a transcription of a real or imagined oral narrative and assumed a singer\u2019s or storyteller\u2019s audience even when being read, for example.\u00a0 Composition in writing changed that, although as late as the nineteenth century, lingering “dear reader” invocations indicated “the writer\u2019s difficulty in feeling himself as other than storyteller.”<\/p>\n
Hemingway\u2019s “casting” of the reader as a “boon companion,” sharing the author\u2019s perceptions and feelings illustrates a further evolution in readers\u2019 roles, Ong states.\u00a0 Prior to the Romantic movement, it was the reader\u2019s familiarity with public knowledge that was assumed.\u00a0 Virgil\u2019s narrator described hardships that were shared by Aeneas and Aeneas\u2019 men.\u00a0 Later, Chaucer\u2019s “frame” story encouraged readers to see themselves on a pilgrimage, a leap assisted by Chaucer\u2019s presence as the narrator amond the fictional pilgrims.<\/p>\n
Invention of readers is not limited to fiction.\u00a0 It extends to all writing, from scientific monographs to diary entries, Ong says.\u00a0 He situates the root of this contriving in the “mask” demanded in all human communication, even with oneself.\u00a0 Lovers try to do without such masks, and oral communication can reduce them somewhat, but masks in written communication are “much less removable.”<\/p>\n
Terry Morris
\nUniversity of Dayton<\/p>\n
In this paper, which was later expanded and published in PMLA and became the most widely-read article in Ong\u2019s body of work, Ong examines various aspects of a key difference between forms of communication:\u00a0 the spoken word exists in an actual present, but the written word almost never does. The act of writing requires a … Continue reading Annotation: The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction<\/span>