Straddling the Divide: Orality v. Literacy in Ancient Greece

Reading: David Abram, Ch 4 from The Spell of the Sensuous.
If this link doesn’t work, look for Ong’s essay among the readings posted on the Lecture class’s Blackboard site.

Writing: Choose one idea from Abram that strikes you as particularly insightful or counterintuitive. In two ¶s, present this idea to your reader and explore its implications. Just as in the last HW, the challenge is to ensure that your second ¶ does something different from the first, making it meaningfully distinct. Doing so may be a bit harder this time, since both ¶s draw from the same source, but consider the following possibilities: (1) move from confusion to understanding, (2) move from one step to the next in a logical argument, (3) move from certainty to new doubt. (Here’s a longer list of possibilities: link.)

Paste your two-¶ sequence into the comments below. (Once again, make sure to skip an extra line between ¶s so they look good on this website.)

Using Sources
With the essay draft due early next week, we should talk tomorrow about methods of using sources. It’s a complicated question, since we have four distinct ways of using a source. Here’s a quick survey to get our conversation started in class tomorrow: link. The survey should take you just 5 minutes.