Fighting for Life : Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness / Walter J. Ong.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ong, Walter J., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Human beings.

Competition (Psychology).

Sex differences (Psychology).

Consciousness.

Life.

Sociobiology.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (240 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, [2012]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

"Fighting for Life is a book about contest, the agonia of the Greek arena, and its roots in male life, especially academia. Ong describes this work as an 'excavation' which was prompted by his previous explorations of such areas as the characteristics of oral and literate cultures, Peter Ramus and his 16th-century intellectual milieu, and the early dominance and more recent decline of classical rhetoric in education. In Fighting for Life, he weaves the results of a year's study of agonistic structures running through the biological, social, and noetic worlds. Describing his text as an 'essay in noobiology,' the biological roots of human consciousness, Ong claims that 'contest has been a major factor in organic evolution and it turns out to have been a major, and seemingly essential, factor in intellectual development.' . . . The work is a valuable synthesis of a wide body of research and theory."-Rhetoric Society Quarterly

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Preface

Part One. Backgrounds

1. Contest and Other Adversatives

Part Two. Patterns of Adversativeness

2. Contest and Sexual Identity

3. Separation and Self-Giving: Pietà and Quixote

Part Three. Past. Present. and Future

4. Academic and Intellectual Arenas

5. Some Present Issues

6. Contest and Interiorization

References

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed Feb. 24, 2017)

ISBN:

9780801466281

0801466288

9780801466298

0801466296

OCLC:

873025696