Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

by Maryanne Wolf

Two decades ago, Ong asserted that the real issue in human intellectual evolution is not the set of skills advanced by one cultural mode of communication versus another, but the transformative changes bestowed on humans steeped in both. In a prescient passage, Ong wrote: The interaction between the orality that all human beings are born into and the technology of writing, which no one is born into, touches the depths of the psyche. It is the oral word that first illuminates consciousness with articulate language, that first divides subject and predicate and then relates them to one another, and that ties human beings to one another in society. Writing introduces division and alienation, but a higher unity as well. It intensifies the sense of self and fosters more conscious interaction between persons. Writing is consciousness-raising.