Dumbed down Chapter 2

Ong talked about his brief account of studies done by Milman Parry and Eric Havelock on the "noetic" characteristics of oral cultures.  After summarizing Parry's investigation of tradition of the oral epic and his writtings on Homeric poetry, Ong said that we cannot but be convinced that Parry was correct in concluding that "The Homeric poems valued and somehow made capital of what readers like me had been trained to disvalue, namely, the set phrase, the formula, the epected qualifier- ok I will say it the cliche.  According to Ong the Greeks of Homer's age relied on such formulaic uses of language to aid in the retention of knowledge.  Without writing, if thoughts were not experessed in easily remembered forms and wern't constantly repeated would be lost.  Ong then explains that Eric Havelock, in Preface to Plato, extended Parry's conclusions to include the entirety of ancient Greek culture.  In Ong's words, Havelock shows how "Plato's exclusion of the poets from his Republic was Plato's rejection of the "pristine aggregative, paratactic, oral-style thinking perpetuated in Homer in favor of the keen analysis or dissection of the world and of thought itself made possible by the interiorization of the alphabet in the Greek psyche"