Orality and Literacy. The Significance of Literacy

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Kassel, language: English, abstract: Writing has become an indispensable and inherent part in the daily routine of western societies. We learn how to read and write without considering the significance of a literate culture, being interested in how oral cultures develop to literate cultures, or what impact literacy has on a culture. These considerations will be subject of this paper.

The initial chapter provides a short overview of previous research in the field of orality and literacy. Following Dürscheid, chapter two defines the concept of literacy and orality, whereby the latter concept will be subdivided into primary and secondary orality. In order to clarify which techniques oral cultures used before the evolution of writing, chapter three discusses the characteristics of oral cultures that have been determined by Walter Ong. Subsequently, I will focus on the shift from orality to literacy showing that writing was not simply invented but made its transition in evolutionary stages, i. e. from pictographic precursors of writing to a fully developed phonetic writing system. The last chapter concentrates on the impact of literacy on the society making clear that the evolution of writing affected entire social areas and led to the emergence of crucial developments in politics, philosophy, and theology.