Orality is still flourishing as a topic, not only in literary studies but
in a dozen other disciplines as well. Still a very good introduction is
Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy, first published in 1982.

Others in addition to David Barrow have made connections between orality
and Mark Twain (as well as with Hawthorne, Melville, and other American
writers), in this country as well as in Germany.

Two studies that come to mind (meaning I wrote them) are "Language
Technologies in A Connecticut Yankee," in Nineteenth Century Fiction,
(1991), and "`The Seeing Eye and the Creating Mouth':  Orality and
Literacy in Mark Twain's Joan of Arc," in CLIO (1992).  A related article,
co-authored with Thomas Walsh, "Mark Twain and the Art of Memory" appeared
in American Literature in 1981.

Does anyone know what George Bush thinks of orality?

Thomas D. Zlatic