We know now that there is much more than text. “Texts,” as Geoffrey Hartman, has observed, “are false bottom.” The implications of scholars’ blindness to the nontextual and of their recent discovery of their own blindness have still not been worked out entirely. Textual squint is still with us, and, in some ways, with deconstruction has become more disabling in certain quarters at the very time that its diagnosis has become easier. The way to overcome textual squint is not to devise theories, which textualism promotes ad nauseam, but to call attention to reality, to the relationship of texts to the full human lifeworld, …”
Page 2 of “MLA 1984 Literacy Studies”
This passage is from the second page of a five page edited typescript at The Walter J. Ong Collection. The web site notes that “Ong’s notes indicate that this talk was part of the ‘What is Literacy Theory’ session (program item #190) of the 1984 MLA Convention.” I wonder what Ong would make of the Dictionary of Words in the Wild? I don’t think Ong had wild text in mind as a way of overcoming the “textual squint”; the hand notation “Alice Springs” in the left-hand margin suggests what he thought would be an example of nontextual human lifeworld.