No inward turn of consciousness - no literary modernism.
Now, according to Shippey, Tolkien does not represent the inward turn of consciousness. Shippey says, "In the cultures Tolkien admired, introspection was not admired. He was aware of it, in a way his ancient models were not, but he did not develop it" (p. 315).
Ah, but this brings us to the bigger picture that Ong's media ecology account of our Western cultural history offers us. In the last quotation from Shippey, we can now rename "the [ancient and medieval] cultures Tolkien admired" as residually oral forms of what Ong refers to as primary oral cultures. Contrary to what Shippey asserts that the cultures that Tolkien admired did not admire introspection, ancient and medieval Western culture contained clear elements of admiration for introspection, and in print culture introspection received more emphasis that it had previously in our Western cultural history.
Now, what Ong himself refers to as the inward turn of consciousness emerged historically in our Western cultural history in ancient and medieval manuscript cultures and expanded enormously in our modern print culture that emerged after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s.
However, according to Ong, our contemporary Western culture is currently undergoing the deep change that he refers to as secondary orality - or as secondary oral culture.
For Ong, our contemporary secondary oral culture is characterized by the communications media that accentuate sound (such as television, telephone, radio, tape-recording devices, movies with soundtracks, and the like).
Clearly the three epic fantasy adventure films in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, mentioned above, are part of our contemporary secondary oral culture.
For Ong, secondary oral culture is different from primary oral culture, and also from residual forms of primary oral culture, before phonetic alphabetic literacy developed in ancient Hebrew culture and in ancient Greek culture.
Concerning ancient Hebrew culture and the emergence of phonetic alphabetic literacy, see my article "Walter Ong and Harold Bloom Can Help Us Understand the Hebrew Bible" in Explorations in Media Ecology (2012).
Now, taking various hints from Ong, I have written about secondary orality in my essay "Secondary Orality and Consciousness Today" in the well-organized anthology Media, Consciousness, and Culture: Explorations of Walter Ong's Thought, edited by Bruce E. Gronbeck, Thomas J. Farrell, and Paul A. Soukup (1991, pp. 194-209).
Ah, but does secondary oral culture bode well for the inward turn of consciousness? This remains to be seen.
Does our contemporary secondary oral culture bode well for Tolkien's three-volume fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955)? I do not have a crystal ball. I cannot foresee the future. But the critical mass of television owners in the United States emerged around 1960. Since then, Tolkien's three-volume fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings has sold well, and the three epic fantasy adventure films based on The Lord of the Rings were remarkably popular. In addition, on television, the fantasy television series Game of Thrones (2011-2019) emerged as the most popular television series ever. On the internet, mom-son fantasy skits in mom-son porn videos are ubiquitous. It appears that fantasy is extremely popular. In effect, this popularity also means that what Jung refers to as fantasy thinking involving images and associative thinking is extremely popular.
Now, I do not know for sure how the term "modernism" emerged as the way to refer to certain types of contemporary literature that emerged in our Western cultural history after World War I (July 28, 1914, to November 11, 1918).
J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973) saw action in World War I. According to Shippey (p. x), Tolkien "served as an infantry subaltern on the Somme from July to October 1916." The famous battle of the Somme started on July 1, 1916, and ended on November 18, 1916.
In any event, in the English language, two of the most famous practitioners of literary modernism after World War I were T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) and James Joyce (1882-1941) - and Shippey discusses each of them extensively (for specific page references, see the respective "Index" entry for each man [pp. 339 and 341]).
Now, both T. S. Eliot's famous modernist poem The Waste Land and James Joyce's famous modernist novel Ulysses were published in 1922. In 2022, I published a number of OEN articles about both Eliot's modernist poem and Joyce's modernist novel.
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