Response to Mona's essay

Response to Mona: Ong and the Death of the Author

I was particularly intrigued by Mona’s thoughts on Ong’s theory of the superiority of written literacy versus oral literacy. She says, “I thought that Ong’s argument that writing delegates more power to individual words (because they rely solely on one another for context and meaning) than oral speech was unconvincing - orality guarantees that we hear every word, and every inflection, but in reading written texts we can sometimes accidentally overlook words, important and insignificant alike.” It reminded me of Foucault’s idea of “the death of the author.” He theorized that for a text to be written, the author’s ‘true’ meaning has to die first. He believed that because the text is not being read by the author, the readers own interpretations becomes the meaning. No two readers are going to understand a text in the same way. A text is read from a particular point of view that has been shaped by that person’s lifestyle, social norms, and life experiences. Though some people may read a text similarly, no two interpretations are exactly alike.

I think this is an important idea to remember when thinking about literacy. One of the basic tenements of literacy is that it is highly individualized. Literacy is different for everyone because everyone is different. People from oral cultures are literate and understand ideas in a different way than people from written cultures. To give more validity to one culture over another is a one-sided argument. This argument parallels the one that Plato makes about orality and the danger of misunderstanding that written text can invite.