Beginning with a charming Scottish traveler's tale this book provides new insights into the nature of oral and written forms of communication and makes a renewed attempt to link the discussion of orality and literacy with the exploration of modern media. By combining investigations in both study areas the volume offers mutual illuminations of phenomena in both fields and prepares the ground for telling the whole story of communication forms from oral storytelling through book printing to the moving and talking pictures of cinema and television. The essays take up ideas developed by Parry and Lord, Ong and McLuhan and also by the Russian Formalist critic Eikhenbaum and the German critic Walter Benjamin. The volume proposes a new, integrated approach to the study of communication forms and media from all ages of civilization by shifting the emphasis of investigation from the familiar polarization and differentiation of the various communication forms to an examination of their interaction and multiple interrelations. This approach provides for more precise and more complex descriptions of oral, written and electronically transmitted modes of communication, and it discovers the multi-sensory nature of most forms of cultural production and perception.