1 Eliot, ‘The Burial of the Dead,’ in The Waste Land (1922).
2 McLuhan, Letter to Walter J. Ong, 18 May 1946, Letters, 187.
3 While discussing the structure of McLuhan’s mosaic, I do not pursue a structuralist approach. Concerning this issue, in his biography of Marshall McLuhan, W. Terrence Gordon addresses the question ‘Is McLuhan a Linguist?’ and answers it comparing McLuhan’s ideas to those developed by scholars pertaining to various fields of research (semiotics, linguistics, structuralism, etc.), with a special emphasis on de Saussure. Gordon’s intention is to deconstruct all criticism coming from areas of studies conceived as organized disciplines, maintaining that McLuhan’s theories somehow transcend them all and, at the same time, contain them all (see Gordon, Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding, 323ff). It is not my intention in this book to take a clear-cut side on McLuhan’s belonging to well-defined schools of thought, as I am more interested in approaching Marshall McLuhan’s mosaic per se, as a form conceived as an operative tool to probe the dynamics of the so-called ‘electric age.’ It is not so important for me to assess if McLuhan was ahead of, or in contrast with, some school of criticism, as it is to discuss the role played by the humanities (and especially literature and the arts) in the making of his own forma mentis, as well as of his own operative project. Our age is moving fast and it is not always easy to understand the hidden pattern of situations which constantly remould our global setting; it seems to me that McLuhan’s mosaic could still be approached as an interesting form to address such a complexity.
4 Dunlop, ‘Seeing,’ in Metropolis.
5 I discuss Poe’s short story as a literary paradigm in the following chapter, ‘A Renewed Approach to Marshall McLuhan’s Poetics.’
6 The list of critics who have commented in favour or against McLuhan’s works is a very long one; it includes critics belonging to various fields of research and to different national realities: Tom Wolfe, James C. Morrison, Arthur Kroker, Gianpiero Gamaleri, Enrico Baragli, Robert K. Logan, to name just a few. Their works (together with many others) are acknowledged in the Bibliography. For my study, particularly useful have been those works postulating and exploring McLuhan’s literary roots. In particular, Philip Marchand’s biography, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger, is the book which initiated me to the understanding of McLuhan’s own ground. Also relevant have been the works of Donald Theall, Glenn Willmott, and Janine Marchessault as they have further explored (or even criticized, as in the case of Theall) specific aspects of McLuhan’s humanistic background. Concerning the broad field of media studies, there are two chapters in two different books which have acknowledged McLuhan’s works as groundbreaking. In ‘Canonic Anti-text: Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media’ (in Katz et al., eds, Canonic Texts in Media Research: Are There Any? Should There Be? How about These? 191–212), Joshua Meyrowitz discusses McLuhan’s ‘Major Principles,’ ‘McLuhan’s Rise and Fall,’ and his ‘Resurrection.’ This essay aims at including McLuhan as part of the canon in the field of communication, tracing back McLuhan’s ideas on media and society, as well as some of his most puzzling rhetorical devices (i.e., ‘Fuzzy Terminology,’ ‘Probes versus Scientific Clams,’ ‘Lack of Methodological Maps,’ ‘Absolutist Claims’). In particular, the first part of Meyrowitz’s essay (‘McLuhan’s Rejection of Text-Based Analysis’) offers some preliminary considerations which are useful for my discussion on the literary roots of McLuhan’s media studies in this book. Also, in ‘Marshall McLuhan: The Modern Janus’ (in Lum, ed., Perspectives on Culture, Technology and Communication, 163–200), James C. Morrison positions McLuhan as a founding father of media ecology, articulating his analysis through a series of conceptual staples: ‘The New Media Age,’ ‘Media as Environments,’ ‘Style and Substance,’ ‘Synesthesia,’ ‘Media Hot and Cool,’ ‘Retrievals of Orality,’ ‘Nonlinear Causality,’ ‘Centers and Margins,’ ‘Summa Medialogica.’ All interested readers will find both these essays useful to trace back McLuhan’s ideas on media and society, as well as to compare two approaches to McLuhan ‘the media scholar’ pertaining to different areas of media(ecology) studies.
7 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 7.
8 See Feste in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1.5.29–33).
9 Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 98.34–35.
1 Carpenter, Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me, 162.
2 ‘A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media’ is the subtitle of a famous interview published in the magazine Playboy, March 1969.
3 See note 6 in the Prologue.
4 McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, v.
5 Liss Jeffrey in Benedetti and DeHart, eds, Forward through the Rear-View Mirror, 10.
6 Eric McLuhan, in ibid., 45.
7 James, The Figure in the Carpet, 365.
8 Eco, ‘Il problema della definizione dell’arte’ (1963), in La definizione dell’arte, 142–3.
9 Theall, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, 94.
10 Theall, The Medium Is the Rear-View Mirror; Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger; Willmott, McLuhan, or Modernism in Reverse; Marchessault, Marshall McLuhan; Cavell, McLuhan in Space: Cultural Geography.
11 McLuhan, ‘The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time’ (1943), 447.
12 McLuhan, ‘Foreword’ to The Interior Landscape, xiii–xiv.
13 I have discussed some of the following ideas at various conferences and in several essays. In particular: ‘Marshall McLuhan’s Critical Writing,’ in Dotoli, ed., Prospettive di Cultura Canadese, 199–211; ‘Marshall McLuhan and the Modernist Writers’ Legacy,’ in Moss and Morra, eds, At the Speed of Light There Is Only Illumination, 63–83; ‘Integral Awareness: Marshall McLuhan as a Man of Letters,’ in Strate and Wachtel, eds, The Legacy of McLuhan, 153–62.
14 See, for instance, Finkelstein, Sense and Nonsense in McLuhan.
15 The Interior Landscape, vi.
16 The Mechanical Bride, v–vi
17 Ibid., v (my emphasis).
18 Ibid.
19 ‘Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media,’ Playboy, March 1969, p. 56.
20 Pound, ABC of Reading, 29.
21 Ford Madox Ford (Hueffer), quoted in Stang, ed., The Ford Madox Ford Reader, 266.
22 See, among others, the various comments in Stearn, ed., McLuhan, Hot and Cool; and in Rosenthal, ed., McLuhan: Pro & Con.
23 In his volume The Medium Is the Rear-View Mirror: Understanding McLuhan, Donald Theall writes critically about McLuhan as a ‘humanist manqué,’ and compares McLuhan’s ‘philosophy’ to the philosophy of well-known humanists such as Thomas More and Erasmus to prove that while the latter ‘had their antennae tuned to their own periods,’ McLuhan did not. McLuhan’s generalist approach is deconstructed as an assemblage of ‘random electric choices,’ and his synthesis as far from grasping the complexity of his time’s sensibility: ‘McLuhan, rather than attempting such a general synthesis, picks and chooses without ever relating what he picks or chooses to some kind of discussion of theoretical orientation’ (ibid., 115ff). Theall’s discussion of McLuhan as a ‘curious universal scholar’ is quite an interesting and a sophisticated one; and yet, it is still embedded in the historical context that strongly affected the reception of McLuhan’s ideas, including the reception of McLuhan ‘the scholar’ shifting towards the business world (something that Theall implicitly condemns and uses to trivialize McLuhan’s ideas). It is true that Theall’s erudite investigation of McLuhan came at a time when the image of the ‘pop philosopher’ and the ‘media guru’ was at its peak, and when McLuhan was boldly exploiting his own popularity (as per Theall, ‘McLuhan potentially distorts sources as he creates his own popular myth…’ [ibid., xvii ff]). Ambiguously, Theall praises McLuhan’s ‘fund of history and sense of tradition which few possess these days. He represents a willingness to confront the present and yet not to reject the past’ (ibid.); but, he also compares his attitude to that of a propagandist, making him a ‘humanist manqué.’
24 Frye, ‘Across the River and Out of the Trees,’ in Mythologizing Canada, 172.
25 Marshall McLuhan often quoted Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Philosophy of Composition’ as a literary essay offering a clear explanation of how a writer can obtain an effect through a careful development of rhetorical patterns. This essay became his life-long example of full awareness of one’s own poetical process and narrative, obtained by unravelling a situation from the final effect to its formal cause – a technique which is also at the basis of the detective story, one of McLuhan’s favourite literary genres. (See chapter 7 of this volume, ‘McLuhan and Media Studies.’) Similarly, as we shall see in Part Two, all the modernist writers praised by McLuhan were both literary critics and conscious authors, interested in the technical and formal aspects of different literary and artistic productions.
26 Pound, ‘A Few Don’t’s by an Imagist,’ in Literary Essays, 9.
27 The Italian translation is quite a case in point. Written years before other studies on the interplay of mass culture, media, advertising, and sociological issues (e.g., Roland Barthes’s Mythologies was published in 1957; Umberto Eco’s Il Superuomo di massa, in 1976), The Mechanical Bride was published in Italian only in 1984 (La sposa meccanica: Il Folclore dell’uomo industriale, translated by Francesca Gorjup Valente and Carla Plevano Pezzini [Varese: SugarCo Edizioni]). Significantly, in his introduction to the Italian edition, critic Roberto Faenza observes that the editorial ‘delays’ had consequences: the delay of McLuhan’s first book being available to the Italian-speaking audience had allowed the promotion as original interpretations of media and cultural phenomena ideas which were, instead, borrowed from the Canadian thinker. (On this issue, see also Lamberti, Marshall McLuhan: Tra letteratura, arte e media, 26ff.)
28 ‘What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem’ (T.S. Eliot, notes to The Waste Land [1922]).
29 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 63.
30 See McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media.
31 ‘Introduction,’ in Benedetti and DeHart, eds, Forward through the Rear-View Mirror, 45.
32 See Havelock, Preface to Plato; Ong, Orality and Literacy.
33 McLuhan and Watson, From Cliché to Archetype.
34 Marchand, Marshall McLuhan, 252.
35 McLuhan, ‘The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time’ (PhD diss., Cambridge University, 1943). This work has recently been edited by W. Terrence Gordon and published with the title The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time (Corte Madera: Ginko Press, 2006).
36 See, for instance, ‘American Advertising,’ Horizon, October 1947, pp. 132–41. The Mechanical Bride was published in 1951, even though McLuhan had started to work on it several years before. (See both Marchand, Marshall McLuhan, 107–10; and Gordon, Escape into Understanding, 153–7.)
37 From the note printed on all issues of Explorations.
38 Lum, ed., Perspectives on Culture, Technology and Communication, 27.
39 Ibid., 9.
40 In his historiography of media ecology, Lum refers to Thomas Kuhns’s idea of ‘Theory Groups’ (1962), as well as to Belver C. Griffith and Nicholas C. Mullins’s, and Stephen O. Murrays’s idea of ‘Invisible Colleges’ (1972, 1993), to demonstrate that the intellectual tradition of media ecology originated outside the official academic programs, in the works of the so-called ‘Post-Industrial Prophets’ (Lewis Mumford, Sigfried Giedion, Norbert Wiener, Harold Adam Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Elul, R. Buckminster Fuller, as per Kuhns’s definition in his The Post-Industrial Prophets: Interpretations of Technology [1971]). Neil Postman was then the ‘Leader’ who established the Media Ecology Program at NYU’s School of Education (a pioneering phase in the years 1967–70; a PhD program in 1970), while Terence P. Moran and Christine L. Nystrom became the ‘Organizer’ and the ‘Theoretician/Codifier’ helping to launch and consolidate the program. (see Lum, ed., Perspectives, 19–28). Today, that legacy is pursued by the Media Ecology Association (MEA): ‘a not-for-profit organization dedicated to promoting the study, research, criticism, and application of media ecology in educational, industry, political, civic, social, cultural, and artistic contexts, and the open exchange of ideas, information, and research among the Association’s members and the larger community’ (see http://www.media-ecology.org).
41 Morrison, ‘Marshall McLuhan: The Modern Janus,’ 194.
42 McLuhan, ‘The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time,’ 49.
43 McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, 9.
44 Derrick de Kerckhove, ‘Techniques d’intuition,’ in Kerckhove and Iannucci, eds, McLuhan e la metamorfosi dell’uomo, 27 (my translation).
45 Contrary to what is asserted by Theall in The Medium Is the Rear-View Mirror (see, for instance, chapter 8), W. Terrence Gordon recalls that in the 1970s Ferdinand de Saussure’s manual was one of the books McLuhan engaged with constantly, not to embrace de Saussure’s thesis in toto, but to further investigate language potentialities (see Gordon, Escape into Understanding, 323 ff).
46 See references to Richards in McLuhan’s letters from Cambridge, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 50, 58, 79.
47 Richards, Science and Poetry, 56.
48 Ibid., 55.
49 Willmott, McLuhan, 11–24.
50 McLuhan, Counterblast, 14.
51 McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, vii.
52 Ibid.
53 Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 221 (my emphasis).
54 Willmott, McLuhan, 37.
55 Richards, Science and Poetry, 58.
56 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, lxii.
57 McLuhan, Counterblast (1954), n.pag.
58 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 170.
59 For a discussion of Bacon’s ideas in The Advancement of Learning, see McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 117ff.
60 ‘Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media,’ Playboy, March 1969, p. 74.
61 Ibid.
62 McLuhan, Florida State University Lecture, 1970, in Video McLuhan 5, written and narrated by T. Wolfe.
63 McLuhan, ‘James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial,’ in The Interior Landscape, 31–2.
64 Marshall McLuhan, in ‘The Art of Wychwood Park,’ ed. Albert W.M. Fulton and Keith M.O. Miller, Wychwood Park Library, Toronto; quoted in Nevitt and McLuhan, Who Was Marshall McLuhan? 34.
65 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 95 (my emphasis).
66 Medawar, The Hope of Progress, 25.
67 Ibid., 31.
68 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 85.
1 Ong, Orality and Literacy, 68.
2 ‘The execution belongs to the author alone; it is what is most personal to him, and we measure him by that. The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and the responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant – no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes’ (James, The Art of Fiction, 9).
3 Ford Madox Ford discusses the elaborations of the concepts of ‘time shift,’ ‘progression d’effet,’ and ‘juxtaposition of situations’ in his memoir Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924).
4 See, among many, T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’ and the other essays in The Sacred Wood (1920).
5 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 430.
6 Landow, Hypertext 3.0, 1.
7 See Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism.
8 Ong, Orality and Literacy, 100.
9 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, lxii.
10 See, as one among many possible examples, the chapter entitled ‘The Phonograph: The Toy That Shrank the National Chest’ in Understanding Media, where anecdotic and colloquial stories (see p. 371) are constantly juxtaposed with more scholarly dissertations (see p. 373).
11 Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, 3.1.59–67.
12 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 284.
13 McLuhan, The Interior Landscape, xiv.
14 ‘Marshall McLuhan,’ 1-Famous-Quotes.com, Gledhill Enterprises, 2011, http://www.1-famous-quotes.com/quote/565562, accessed 26 July 2011.
15 McLuhan and Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village, 3.
16 Sobelman, Marshall McLuhan, 10. See also McLuhan on interface in his ‘Introduction’ to H.A. Innis, The Bias of Communication: ‘Interface refers to the interaction of substances in a kind of mutual irritation. In art and poetry this is precisely the technique of symbolism … with its paratactic procedure of juxtaposition without connective. It is the natural form of conversation or dialogue rather than of written discourse’ (viii). McLuhan returns to this concept in The Gutenberg Galaxy: ‘Two cultures or technologies can, like astronomical galaxies, pass through one another without collision: but not without change of configuration. In modern physics there is, similarly, the concept of “interface” or the meeting and metamorphosis of two structures. Such “interficiality” is the very key to the Renaissance, as to our twentieth century’ (170).
17 ‘Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media,’ Playboy, March 1969, p. 54.
18 ‘Marshall McLuhan,’ 1-Love-Quotes.com, Gledhill Enterprises, 2011, http://www.1-love-quotes.com/quote/912500, accessed 27 July 2011.
19 McLuhan, ‘The Future of the Book,’ in Understanding Me, 177–80.
20 See Ong, Orality and Literacy, 9.
21 See Marinetti’s preface to his Antologia dei poeti futuristi (1912).
22 Ong, Orality and Literacy, 3.
23 ‘As we extend our educational operation by television and videotape we shall find that the teacher is no longer the source of data but of insight. More and more teachers will be needed for the type of depth instruction that goes naturally with television, with light through rather than light on’ (McLuhan, ‘Electronic Revolution – 1959,’ in Understanding Me, 10).
1 This documentary sums up all the ideas expressed in the volume of the same title, written in collaboration with artist Quentin Fiore. See The Medium Is the Massage, with Marshall McLuhan, Long-Playing Record, 1968, produced by John Simon, conceived and coordinated by Jerome Agel, written by Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, and Jerome Agel.
2 Walter Ong quoted in McLuhan, Letters, 94.
3 Ong, Orality and Literacy, 15.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., 7, 8.
6 Ibid., 36.
7 Ibid., 38.
8 Ibid., 110–11.
9 This idea constitutes an underpinning leitmotiv in McLuhan’s doctoral dissertation, ‘The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time’ (1943).
10 Ibid., 40.
11 McLuhan, ‘Media Hot and Cold,’ in Understanding Media, 39–50.
12 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 413, 425–6.
13 Ong, Orality and Literacy, 41.
14 To avoid being misunderstood, I invite you to remember that I am not discussing here McLuhan’s private persona but his mosaic, that is, the summa of all his various masks, of which the private man is just one (and, no doubt, as a private persona, McLuhan was a conservative).
15 Ong, Orality and Literacy, 15.
16 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 12.
17 ‘Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media,’ Playboy, March 1969, p. 64. These ideas clearly opened the way to the new field of studies offered by media ecology, as well as to Neil Postman’s pedagogical concepts as expressed in books such as Teaching as a Conserving Activity (1979) See also Strate, Echoes and Reflections: On Media Ecology as a Field of Study (2006).
18 Ong, Orality and Literacy, 48.
19 Ibid., 44.
20 Ibid., 45–6.
21 Ibid., 42.
22 Ibid., 49.
23 Marshall and McLuhan, Laws of Media, 36.
1 See, for instance, McLuhan, Galbraith, Marcuse parlent à FORCES (Montreal: Relations publiques de l’Hydro-Québec, 1973).
2 ‘The fourth world is the electric world that goes around the first, the second and the third. The first is the industrial world of the nineteenth century; the second is Russian socialism; the third is the rest of the world where industrial institutions have not established themselves yet. And the fourth world is a world that goes around all of them. The fourth world is us, the electric world, is the computer world. The fourth world can come to Africa before the first and the second worlds…’ (Video McLuhan 6, York University Lecture, 1979).
3 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 33, 81.
4 See Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 33ff.
5 Hayles, The Cosmic Web, 15.
6 McLuhan and Parker, Through the Vanishing Point, 2.
7 Ibid.
8 The DEW Line is also the name McLuhan gave to a newsletter he edited in collaboration with the Human Development Corporation in New York City from July 1968 to October 1970. He also used this concept during a radio talk for CBC, in May 1927, ‘Canada: A Borderline Case,’ in relation to the idea of frontier: ‘McLuhan spoke of the DEW line as a kind of electronic frontier, a borderline of data and information’ (McNamara in The Interior Landscape, 181).
9 McLuhan and Parker, Through the Vanishing Point, 3.
10 Ibid., 6.
11 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 36.
12 See Umberto Boccioni, Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio (1913). McLuhan mentions Boccioni in Understanding Media, 206.
13 Capra, The Tao of Physics, 42–3 (my italics).
14 Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 43.
15 As Eric McLuhan further recalls: ‘Of course there was rigour and science in it aplenty, but not conventional science. How then could we reconcile the two: satisfy the one without subverting the other? There began the search that led to the present book … Now we were faced with the question of how to make it “scientific.” It took my father nearly two full yeas of constant inquiry to find out what constitutes a scientific statement. He asked everyone he encountered – colleagues, students, friends, associates, visitors. Finally, one evening, he found the answer in Sir Karl Popper’s Objective Knowledge – that it was something stated in such a manner that it could be disproved. That was it’ (Laws of Media, viii).
16 Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 31, 35, 45–50.
17 Ford, The English Novel, 24.
18 Capra, The Tao of Physics, 33.
19 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 40.
20 McLuhan, Counterblast, 23.
21 McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, 15.
22 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 36.
23 McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, 40.
24 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 40.
25 McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, 16.
26 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 183.
27 Ibid., 283.
28 Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 50.
29 McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, 43.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid., 6–7.
32 Ibid., 110.
33 Ibid., 76.
34 Ibid., 41.
35 See R.J. Trotter, ‘The Other Hemisphere,’ Science News 109.2 (April 1976); and J. Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1976). McLuhan engages with these studies in his essay ‘The Brain and the Media: The Western Hemisphere,’ and in Laws of Media, 67 ff.
36 Okakura Kazuko’s The Book of Tea, quoted in Laws of Media, 78.
37 McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, 78.
38 Ibid., 49.
39 McLuhan and Parker, Through the Vanishing Point, 36–7.
1 Perloff, ‘Modernist Studies,’ in Greenblatt and Gunn, eds, Redrawing the Boundaries, 154.
2 Dettmar, ‘Introduction,’ in Rereading the New, 1–24.
3 Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Part II (1920).
4 Among the most famous books discussing modernism in terms of an ideological and political approach is the highly controversial volume by Paul Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia (1989), which tries to establish an antithetical and irreconcilable positioning of modernists and masses. As far as I see it, I’d rather stand with a more articulated approach, such as the one offered by Michael Tratner in Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats (1995), or Melba Cuddy-Keane in Virginia Woolf: The Intellectual and the Public Sphere (2003).
5 Marchand, Marshall McLuhan, 37.
6 Ibid., 56.
7 McLuhan, ‘Dos Passos: Technique vs. Sensibility,’ in The Interior Landscape, 54–5.
8 McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, vii.
9 See Bacigalupo, ‘Le poetiche dell’impersonalità: Pound, Eliot, Joyce e Lewis.’
10 Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 54, 58 (my italics).
11 ‘The Communication Revolution,’ Video McLuhan 4, Ohio State University Panel, 1958,
12 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 95.
13 Ibid., 219.
14 McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, 100.
15 See: Fortunati, ‘Il metabolismo delle forme narrative nel romanzo impressionista’; Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde; Di Michele, Le avanguardie artistiche del Novecento; Bradbury and McFarlane, eds, Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890–1930; Cianci, ed., Modernismo/Modernismi.
16 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 85.
17 McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, 48–9.
18 Lorenzini, Introduction, in Il paesaggio interiore: La critica letteraria di Marshall McLuhan, 11.
1 Moss, ‘Introduction,’ in At the Speed of Light There Is Only Illumination, 1.
2 See, for instance, Video McLuhan 2 – 1965–1970, written and narrated by Tom Wolfe.
3 Stone, Marshall McLuhan and the Humanist Tradition: Media Theory and Encyclopaedic Learning, 100.
4 Ibid., 101.
5 Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (1982).
6 Landow, Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization, 1.
7 Ibid., 4.
8 Nelson, Literary Machines, 2.
9 ‘Memex’ is an acronym bridging ‘memory’ and ‘index,’ a term created by Vannevar Bush for a theoretical prototype (or ‘proto-idea’) of the would-be hypertext and discussed in his by now classic essay ‘As We May Think.’
10 Moos, ‘The Hypertext Heuristic: McLuhan Probes Tested (A Case for Edible Spaceship),’ in Strate and Watchel, eds, The Legacy of McLuhan, 305–22.
11 Ibid., 315.
12 See Video McLuhan 5, Florida State University Lecture, 1970.
13 Moos, ‘The Hypertext Heuristic,’ 316.
14 Ibid., 318.
15 Ibid., 317.
16 McLuhan, ‘Introduction,’ in The Bias of Communication, by H.A. Innis, vii–xvi.
17 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 74.
18 Ibid., 63.
19 See also Moos, ‘The Hypertext Heuristic,’ 308–9.
20 Ibid., 310.
21 McLuhan, ‘Introduction,’ in The Bias of Comunications, by H.A. Innis, ix. See also Logan, ‘The Axiomatics of Innis and McLuhan.’
22 Moos, ‘The Hypertext Heuristic,’ 310–11. The final passage is quoted from McLuhan’s ‘Introduction,’ in The Bias of Comunications, by H.A. Innis, vii.
1 Lamberti, ‘From Linear to Acoustic Space,’ in Liska and Eysteinsson, eds, Modernism, 431–48.
2 Valdivia, ed., A Companion to Media Studies, 1.
3 Katz et al., eds, Canonic Texts in Media Research, 154 (my italics).
4 See the chapter ‘L’accusa di determinismo’ in Lamberti, Marshall McLuhan: Tra letteratura, arte e media, 80ff.
5 ‘My theory of communication is a theory of transformation as opposed to the theories on communication based on transportation. Transportation: how you move information from point A to point B to point C … to avoid disturbance, deviation. That’s not what I study. Transformation: what do these media do to the people who use them? How people are changed by the instrument they employ? … The medium is the message means a hidden environment of services created by an innovation. It is the environment that changes people, not the technology’ (Video McLuhan 5, Florida State University Lecture, 1970).
6 See chapter 6 in this volume, ‘The Hyper-Language of the Media “Fan.”’
7 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, lxii.
8 See Joshua Meyrowitz’s essay in Katz et al., eds, Canonic Texts in Media Research.
9 See Strate, Echoes and Reflections.
10 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 229.
11 See, for instance, Video McLuhan 5, Florida State University Lecture, 1970.
12 As recalled by Philip Marchand in his volume Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger: ‘The contemporary political movement he mentioned with some guarded approval was fascism; aware of their numerous errors, he nonetheless approved of the Fascists’ diagnosis of the ills of the modern world. The Fascists, in urging a return to heroic enterprises, in rejecting the dull, “emasculating” utopias of socialism as well as the rapacious appetites of capitalism, seemed to him to be on the right track’ (27).
13 Stearn, ed., McLuhan, Hot and Cool, 279. Also in Video McLuhan 6, York University Lecture, 1979, he repeats: ‘Marx, I’m not trying to undermine him, I’m simply pointing out the obvious, he was a XIX century man who knew nothing about electricity, nothing about the instantaneous … It never occurred to him that perhaps the most important commodity in the XX century would be information and not hardware products.’
14 Grosswiler, Method Is the Message, 13.
15 Ibid., vii.
16 See Video McLuhan 4, Ohio State University Panel, 1958, ‘The Communication Revolution.’ (See also p. 101 of the present volume.)
17 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 47.
18 McLuhan, Counterblast (1954), n.pag.
19 Ibid.
20 Nerone, ‘Approaches to Media History,’ in Valdivia, ed., A Companion in Media Studies, 99.
21 Calvino, Why Read the Classics, 4, 8.
22 Ibid., 5.
1 Valuable accounts of McLuhan’s life and education at Cambridge University can be found in Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger; Gordon, Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding; and Marchessault, Marshall McLuhan: Cosmic Media.
2 McLuhan, Letters, 44.
3 Ibid., 84.
4 See McLuhan, Letters, 72–3.
5 In a letter to his mother (5 September 1935), McLuhan comments on and explains his conversion to Catholicism, clearly pointing out the role played by Chesterton in the making of his decision; in the same letter, he also underlines that Chesterton was both a spiritual and a literary guide for him. It was Chesterton who opened McLuhan’s eyes to European culture, encouraging him ‘to know it more closely’ (Letters, 73).
6 ‘G.K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic,’ Dalhousie Review 15 (1936): 455–64.
7 Chesterton, The Secret of Father Brown, 6.
8 Doyle, ‘The Science of Deduction,’ chapter 1 of The Sign of the Four, 90.
9 McLuhan, ‘G.K. Chesterton,’ 456, 458.
10 Chesterton, Heretics, 56.
11 McLuhan, Letters, 221.
12 McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, vii.
13 See McLuhan, ‘Formal Causality in Chesterton.’ This essay is now part of a collection, recently published: Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, Media and Formal Cause (Houston: NeoPoiesis Press, 2011).
14 McLuhan, Letters, 18 May 1946, p. 187 (my italics).
15 See McLuhan’s letter to Richards, 12 July 1968, Letters, 355.
16 McLuhan, Letters, 73.
17 See Lamberti, Marshall McLuhan: Tra letteratura, arte e media, especially chapter 5, ‘Il grammatico McLuhan’ (McLuhan the grammarian).
18 McLuhan, ‘The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time’ (1943), 447.
19 Lewis, Time and Western Man, 389.
20 McLuhan, Letters, 41–2.
21 McLuhan, The Interior Landscape, 91.
22 ‘Pound, Eliot, and the Rhetoric of The Waste Land,’ New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 10 (1978–9): 557–80. McLuhan’s essay ‘Mr Eliot’s Historical Decorum’ has been reprinted in Renascence 25.4 (1972–3): 183–9.
23 See, for instance, Tratner, Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats.
24 ‘Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press,’ in The Interior Landscape, 5.
25 Ibid., 17–18.
26 See, for instance, Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.
27 Carpenter, ‘Remembering Explorations,’ 7.
28 McLuhan, Letters, 18 May 1946, p. 187.
29 Ibid., 147.
30 See McLuhan’s letter to Father J. Stanley Murphy (9 March 1944), in which McLuhan introduces his course proposal as ‘a course in the analysis of the present scene. Advertisements, newspapers, best-sellers, detective fictions, movies, etc. Contrasted with a true pattern of homogeneous culture, rationally ordered. This contrast made in concrete detail by analysis say of section of sixteenth century society – its architecture, literature, music, economics, etc.’ (Letters, 157).
31 Ibid., 220–1.
1 Ford, The Critical Attitude, 28.
2 Ibid., 29.
3 Ford, Henry James, 189.
4 Richards, Science and Poetry, 58. See chapter 1 of this volume, ‘A Renewed Approach to Marshall McLuhan’s Poetics.’
5 Bradbury, ‘The English Review’; MacShane, The Life and Work of Ford Madox Ford; Stang, The Ford Madox Ford Reader; Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life.
6 See Elena Lamberti, ‘“Scientific Historian” versus “Social Historian”: Ford Madox Ford’s Historic Sense,’ in Fortunati and Lamberti, eds, Ford Madox Ford and ‘The Republic of Letters,’ 30–40.
7 Goldring, South Lodge: Reminiscences of Violet Hunt, Ford Madox Ford and the English Review Circle, 25.
8 Ford Madox Ford, in the transatlantic review 1 (April 1924): 169.
9 Ford quoted in Poli, Ford Madox Ford and the transatlantic review, 42.
10 Among the sharper criticisms of the young ‘protégés’ are those by Wyndham Lewis (who kept reminding Ford that ‘what people want is me, not you … They want me. A vortex … I … I … I. The Vortex’ (see Ford, Return to Yesterday, 400) and Ernest Hemingway (who in his A Moveable Feast introduces Ford as the devil’s disciple who loved to lie about everything).
11 Wyndham Lewis clearly pointed out the important role played by Ford Madox Ford in relation to Ezra Pound. As he wrote in 1950: ‘It was not the fault of England nor was it his, but I hope I shall not seem sensational if I say that looking back I cannot see him [Ezra Pound] stopping here very long without some such go-between as Ford Madox Hueffer’ (in Russell, ed., An Examination of Ezra Pound, 259). Pound himself acknowledged his debts to Ford Madox Ford, pointing out that the latter forced him to reassess his use of language as a poet: ‘I have put down as a personal debt to my forerunners that I had five, and only five, useful criticisms of my writing in my lifetime, one from Yeats, one from Bridges, one from Thomas Hardy, a recent one from a Roman Archbishop and one from Ford, and that last the most vital, or at any rate on par with Hardy’s … He [Ford] felt the errors of contemporary style to the point of rolling (physically and if you look at it as mere superficial snob ridiculously) on the floor of his temporary quarter in Giessen, when my third volume displayed me trapped, fly-papered, gummed and strapped down in a jejune provincial effort to learn, mehercule, the stilted language then passed for “good English” … And that roll saved me at least two years, perhaps more. It sent me back to my own proper effort, namely, using the living tongue … though none of us has found a more natural language than Ford did’ (Pound in ‘Homage to Ford Madox Ford,’ New Direction 7 [1942]: 480–1).
12 McLuhan, Letters, 206.
13 Ibid., 206–7.
14 ‘Speaking broadly, literature at the present day divides itself into two sharply defined classes – the imaginative and the factual – and there is a third type, the merely inventive which, if it be not in any way to be codeine, has functions in the Republic nearly negligible’ (Ford Madox Ford, in The English Review l [Dec. 1908]: 159).
15 Ford Madox Ford, ‘The Critical Attitude,’ The English Review 3 (Nov. 1909): 665.
16 Stang, ed., The Ford Madox Ford Reader, 266.
17 Together with Joseph Conrad, Ford is considered as the father of literary impressionism, which – progressing within a line Flaubert had begun to trace, the symbolist poets had developed, and Henry James refined – leads to a renewed poetic, as well as to a new form. ‘We saw that life did not narrate,’ wrote Ford recalling his collaboration with Conrad, ‘but made impressions on our brains. We, in turn, if we wish to produce on you an effect of life, must not narrate but render impressions’ (Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, 18). Critics have investigated Ford’s ‘metaphysics,’ discussing how Ford and Conrad developed a new literary ‘realism,’ and showing how their technical experiments were deeply connected with a new sensibility and a subtler idea of ‘truth’ aimed at deconstructing reality in order to rebuild it. The concept of ‘imaginative writing’ is used by Ford himself in order to define a literature whose goal is that of putting the readers into contact with the true spirit of their time. To do so, sometimes the writer disregards the historical facts and develops illuminating visions, which Ford called ‘Impressions.’ See Hampson and Saunders, eds, Ford Madox Ford’s Modernity; Wiesenfarth, ed., History and Representation in Ford Madox Ford’s Writings; Fortunati and Lamberti, eds, Ford Madox Ford and ‘The Republic of Letters.’
18 Ford, The Critical Attitude, 29.
19 ‘What is relevant here to the art of Coleridge concerns the confessional and digressive character of The Ancient Mariner. For it is this confessional and circuitous character which has penetrated not only Byron’s tales but the art of The Ring and the Book, the novels of Henry James, of Ford Madox Ford, and of Joseph Conrad. It is the pattern of Pound’s Mauberley and the Cantos, and provides the thread to the labyrinth of Eliot’s poems from Prufrock to the Cocktail Party’ (Marshall McLuhan, ‘Coleridge as Artist,’ in The Interior Landscape, 131). The second reference to Ford is in the same volume, in the essay ‘John Dos Passos: Technque vs. Sensibility,’ p. 60.
20 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 325.
21 Private interview with Father Dewan, at the Dominican College in Ottawa, 1997.
22 McLuhan, Letters, 173.
23 Ibid., 200.
24 Ibid., 202.
25 Ibid., 204.
26 As Pound wrote, the new poetry should have the following qualities: ’1) Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective; 2) To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation; 3) As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome’ (F.S. Flint, ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagist [Interview with Pound],’ in Poetry, March 1913).
27 As McLuhan recalled: ‘In this century Ezra Pound called the artist “the antenna of the race.” Art as a radar acts as “an early alarm system,” as it were, enabling us to discover social and psychic targets in lots of time to prepare to cope with them’ (‘Introduction to the Second Edition,’ Understanding Media, 16).
28 ‘Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media,’ Playboy, March 1969, p. 56.
29 Ford Madox Ford, ‘The Critical Attitude,’ The English Review 4 (Dec. 1909): 102.
30 ‘Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media,’ Playboy, March 1969, p. 56.
31 Ford, Preface to Stories from de Maupassant, by Elsa Martindale.
32 Ford, The English Novel: From the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad, 32.
33 ‘Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media,’ Playboy, March 1969, p. 56.
34 Ford, A History of Our Own Time, 9–10. The edition quoted (1988) is based on a manuscript (dated ca 1930) sold by Janice Biala (Ford’s companion at the time of his death and his literary executor) to the Cornell University Library in 1973.
35 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 5–6.
36 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 36.
37 Marshall McLuhan, ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America (Sophists vs. Grammarians),’ in The Interior Landscape, 223–34.
38 See Ford, The March of Literature, 150.
39 Elena Lamberti, ‘Reading Ford through Marshall McLuhan: The Fifth Queen in the Light of the New Media,’ in Rademacher, ed., Modernism and the Individual Talent, 45–53.
40 McLuhan, ‘Myth and Mass Media,’ 344.
41 McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, 87.
42 Newman, ‘Ford Madox Ford’s Fifth Queen Trilogy: Mythical Fiction and Political Letters.’
43 Ford, The Fifth Queen, 590.
44 Ibid., 54.
45 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 193.
46 Ford, The Fifth Queen, 22.
47 Ibid., 50.
48 Ibid., 55.
49 Ibid., 79.
50 Ibid., 62.
51 Ibid., 190.
52 Ibid., 12.
53 Ibid., 280.
54 Ibid., 524–5.
55 Ibid., 568.
56 ‘Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media,’ Playboy, March 1969.
57 Ford, The Fifth Queen, 589–90.
58 ‘Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media,’ Playboy, March 1969.
59 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 28.
1 McLuhan, Letters, 217.
2 Ibid., 147.
3 Burgess, One Man’s Chorus.
4 Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger, 94.
5 McLuhan, ‘The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time’ (1943), 447. See chapter 8 in this volume, ‘From Literature to Media Studies.’
6 The Mechanical Bride is the first of a series of books in which McLuhan intended to study man’s relation to the environment as shaped by new technologies. McLuhan hinted at this ‘series’ in a letter to Harry J. Skornia written in 1964: ‘I am finishing up the successor to the Mechanical Bride.’ According to the editors of the volume of letters, McLuhan refers to ‘Culture Is Our Business (1970) – on electronic man (McLuhan had previously studied industrial man in The Mechanical Bride and typographic man in The Gutenberg Galaxy).’ The editors describe Culture Is Our Business as ‘a graphically arresting anthology of advertisements, paired with a series of statements and quotations that they evoked for McLuhan’ (Letters, 306)
7 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 85.
8 Both Barthes and Eco discuss several ‘myths’ of mass society (Barthes, Mythologies; Eco, Apocalittici e integrati; Il superuomo di massa). It is important to recall again that McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride was translated into Italian only in 1984. In his introduction to the Italian edition, Roberto Faenza polemically suggests that such a long delay in translating this important book could have been intentional (‘editorial omissions do have a meaning, too’) in order to be able to present as ‘original … cultural positions which are instead borrowed ones’ (see McLuhan, La sposa meccanica, 7–10).
9 Umberto Eco, Review of La sposa meccanica, in L’Espresso, 25 March 1984, p. 99.
10 See McLuhan, Letters, 405. In 1971, Jonathan Miller wrote his Marshall McLuhan for the Fontana-Collins ‘Modern Masters’ series, edited by Sir Frank Kermode. The final passage of that book immediately reveals how Miller’s take was not in favour of McLuhan’s ideas: ‘And yet I can rehabilitate no actual truth from what I read. Perhaps McLuhan has accomplished the greatest paradox of all, creating the possibility of truth by shocking us with a gigantic system of lies.’ In 1998, I interviewed Sir Kermode on his decision to publish Miller’s negative discussion of McLuhan in his series. Surprisingly, the English critic told me that, in fact, Miller had started with a positive approach to McLuhan’s works but that he changed his opinion while writing it. Kermode published it nevertheless because he chose not to censor Miller, even though his choice inevitably affected his relationship with McLuhan. This story is confirmed by McLuhan’s letters to various friends: his first meeting with Miller was favourably recalled in a letter to Harold Rosenberg, in 1965; similarly, his original correspondence with or on Kermode was on fair terms until Miller’s book came out (see Letters, 375, 426).
11 McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, v.
12 ‘Marshall McLuhan,’ 1-Famous-Quotes.com, Gledhill Enterprises, 2011, http://www.1-famous-quotes.com/quote/565424, accessed 27 July 2011.
13 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 69.
14 Convincing comments on this aspect can be found in Marchessault, Marshall McLuhan: Cosmic Media, 55ff.
15 Ballard, Introduction to Crash, 4.
16 McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, v.
17 Ibid.
18 McLuhan, Marshall, ‘Art as Anti-Environment,’ 56.
19 Ruskin, quoted by McLuhan in The Interior Landscape, 17–18.
20 On the idea of ‘media poetics,’ see McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media. The now constantly referred to expression of ‘media ecology’ can be seen as an extension of McLuhan’s original idea that ‘new media are new languages, their grammar and syntax yet unknown’ (Laws of Media, 229). On the implications of ‘media ecology,’ see, among others, Neil Postman’s Teaching as a Conserving Activity (1979) (Postman has often acknowledged his ‘debt’ to McLuhan) and Lance Strate’s Echoes and Reflections: On Media Ecology as a Field of Study (2006).
21 McLuhan, The Interior Landscape, 17.
22 Ibid., 16 (my italics).
23 Ibid.
24 McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, v.
25 See Eric McLuhan, The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake.
26 McLuhan, The Interior Landscape, xiv.
27 McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, 9. It is a kind of ‘epiphany’ which clearly retrieves the metaphysical poets’ rhetorical strategy. Claude Bissell, president of the University of Toronto when McLuhan was a professor at the university’s St Michael’s College, put it well: ‘Marshall liked to describe his ideas as “probes,” not firm convictions, although he always seemed to express them with conviction. They were attempts to force a reconsideration of accepted ideas. These probes were like the “conceits” of metaphysical poets, who delighted in yoking two disparate things together, with illuminating results for each part of the conceit and for the conceit as a whole. These probes would often emerge in conversation or in the give and take of an informal group setting’ (quoted in Nevitt and McLuhan, Who Was Marshall McLuhan? 188).
1 McLuhan, Letters, 193–4.
2 H. Kenner, The Pound Era (Faber: London, 1971).
3 Marshall McLuhan, book review of The Poetry of Ezra Pound, by Hugh Kenner, Renascence 4.2 (1952): 215–17.
4 The manuscripts and typescripts of both ‘Guide to Cahos’ and ‘Typhon in America,’ ‘early versions of The Mechanical Bride,’ are in the Public Archives of Canada. See McLuhan, Letters, 191.
5 McLuhan, Letters, 173.
6 Ibid.
7 See De Bernardi, Una dittatura moderna, especially the chapter ‘L’affermazione del progetto totalitario,’ 222–74.
8 See, for instance, McLuhan, Letters, 201, 202.
9 As discussed in Part One, the idea of the ‘ideogram’ as a formal model underpins the making of McLuhan’s ‘mosaic.’ Sir Frank Kermode writes about this when commenting on McLuhan’s ‘insoluble problem of method’ in The Gutenberg Galaxy: ‘Typography has made us incapable of knowing and discoursing otherwise than by a “metamorphosis of situations into a fixed point of view”; that is, we reduce everything to the linear and successive, as computers reduce everything to a series of either-ors. And since he [McLuhan] himself is unable to proceed by any other method, he cannot avoid falsifying the facts his books set out to establish. Perhaps its difficulty is more fairly put in a letter that Mr McLuhan was good enough to write me, and which I take the liberty of quoting: He says the ideal form of his book would be an ideogram…’ Kermode continues underlining that ‘the more linear clarity [McLuhan] gives his book, the more obviously he himself becomes the victim of typographic distortion. His book tells us not to believe it. He fights against this by making each chapter-heading a sort of verbal ideograph; if you read them all quickly you get a sort of strip-cartoon puzzle-summary of the book.’ In a witty passage, Kermode offers a comment on McLuhan’s style which can be taken, at once, as praise and criticism: ‘Mr McLuhan’s book is a work of historical explanation, and its merits as well as its defects are related to this. [His is] the method of the specula, or of the old hexameral commentaries, which organised an encyclopaedia into a commentary of Six Days of Creation … In so doing he offers a fresh and coherent account of the state of the modern mind in terms of a congenial myth’ (Kermode, in Stearn ed., McLuhan Hot & Cool, 173–80).
10 See Bacigalupo, ‘Le poetiche dell’impersonalità,’ 261ff.
11 McLuhan, Letters, 199–200.
12 Ibid., 204.
13 See Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound and The Pound Era; Emery, Ideas into Action: A Study of Pound’s Cantos; Mancuso, Pound e la Cina.
14 Marshall McLuhan, book review of The Poetry of Ezra Pound, by Hugh Kenner, Renascence 4.2 (1952): 215–17.
15 Marshall McLuhan, book review of The Letters of Ezra Pound, ed. by D.D. Paige, reprinted in McLuhan, Letteratura e metafore della realtà, 76–80.
16 Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 60.
17 Ibid., 52–3.
18 Pound’s approach to literary tradition is therefore comparable to the one expressed by T.S. Eliot in his famous essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’ published in The Sacred Wood (1920). However, Eliot refers to the domain of artistic creation, whereas Pound extends that approach to his full-scale investigations of historical processes and to his active commitment not only as a poet and critic, but also as a politically engaged citizen.
19 The ‘advent’ of Berlusconi’s commercial TV networks and its impact on Italian life and politics is recalled in a brilliant documentary-movie by Eric Gandini, Videocracy (Lorber Films, 2009).
20 McLuhan, ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America,’ Classical Journal, January 1946, pp. 156–62.
21 Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 6.
22 Ibid.
23 McLuhan, Letters, 18.
24 McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, vii.
25 See the Introduction in Hayles, The Cosmic Web.
26 Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 48.
27 Ibid., 51.
28 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 82.
29 McLuhan and Parker, Through the Vanishing Point, 36–7.
30 In Italy since 1924, Pound bore witness to the establishment and consolidation of the Italian fascist regime, which attracted him as a possible alternative to capitalism, on the one hand, and communism, on the other. In particular, Pound seemed to be fascinated by the idea of a ‘new order’ encouraged by Mussolini, something which, in turn, was based on the idealization of a tradition – the classic and the Roman one – which Pound himself considered as ‘the best one.’ See Doob, ed., ‘Ezra Pound Speaking’: Radio Speeches of World War II; Rizzardi, Una ghirlanda per Ezra Pound; Nicholls, Ezra Pound; S. Sabbadini, ‘Tra eversione e rappel à l’ordre: I percorsi reazionari entre-deux-guerres: Eliot e Pound,’ in Cianci, ed., Modernismo/Modernismi, 423–46.
31 On this theme, see Doob, ed., ‘Ezra Pound Speaking’: Radio Speeches of World War II; Rizzardi, Una ghirlanda per Ezra Pound; and Nicholls, Ezra Pound.
32 Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 27.
33 Morawski, ‘The Basic Functions of Quotations,’ 704.
34 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 102.
1 Jameson, Fables of Aggression, 3.
2 Ibid., 6.
3 Ibid., 4.
4 McLuhan, ‘Wyndham Lewis: Lemuel in Lilliput,’ in The Medium and the Light, 179.
5 For a recollection of the meeting and friendship between McLuhan and Lewis, in addition to Marchand’s and Gordon’s biographies, see McLuhan, Letters, 129ff.
6 Lewis, The Enemy of the Stars, 181.
7 See Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, x.
8 Ibid., xiii. See also Wyndham Lewis, ‘On Canada,’ in Woodcock, ed., Wyndham Lewis in Canada, 24–9.
9 McLuhan, Letters, 165.
10 See, for instance, Wyndham Lewis, ‘Nature’s Place in Canadian Culture,’ in Woodcock, ed., Wyndham Lewis in Canada, 49–59.
11 See McLuhan, Letters, 137.
12 See ibid., 146–7.
13 Ibid., 160.
14 See comments in footnote 5 in McLuhan, Letters, 165.
15 Ibid., 236.
16 Ibid., 85.
17 McLuhan, The Interior Landscape, 85.
18 McLuhan, Letters, 9 December 1953, p. 241.
19 Ibid., 217.
20 Ibid., footnote 5.
21 Lewis, Time and Western Man, 392.
22 Ibid., 393–4, 416–17 (italics in the original).
23 Brett Neilson, seminar at the University of Bologna, academic year 1998–9. These ideas have been further investigated in Brett, ‘Wyndham Lewis in Morocco: Spatial Philosophy and the Politics of Race’; and Brett, ‘Visioni dal vortice: L’emergere dello spazio sociale in Paul Cézanne e Wyndham Lewis.’
24 See, for instance, McLuhan, Letters, 424.
25 McLuhan, The Interior Landscape, 85–9.
26 McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, v.
27 See McLuhan, Counterblast (1954).
28 McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, v.
29 See Bergson, Laughter.
30 Ibid., 3
31 Lewis, The Meaning of the Wild Body, 248.
32 On Lewis’s and Bergson’s ideas on ‘laughter,’ see also Sheila Watson, ‘Canada and Wyndham Lewis the Artist,’ in Woodcock, ed., Wyndham Lewis in Canada, 76.
33 Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, 24 (italics in the original).
34 Lewis quoted by McLuhan in The Interior Landscape, 91.
35 Ibid.
36 McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, v.
37 McLuhan, Letters, 242.
38 Ibid.
39 ‘A World Art and Tradition’ (1929), quoted in C.J. Fox, ‘The Wild Land: A Celebration of Globalism,’ in Woodcock, ed., Wyndham Lewis in Canada, 45.
40 Fox, ‘The Wild Land,’ in Woodcock, ed., Wyndham Lewis in Canada, 45.
41 As noted by Adam Hammond, ‘The work of Wyndham Lewis underwent a profound change during the six years he spent in North America during World War II. The metamorphosis of his political ideas is perhaps the most striking: while in the 1930s Lewis had been an ardent exponent of German and Italian nationalism, after leaving North America he published America and Cosmic Man, a passionate defense of internationalism. As Lewis described it, his time here ‘transformed [him] from a good [sic] European into an excellent internationalist.’ His stay in North America also marked a turning point in his stylistic development–a change registered in the strikingly dissimilar volumes of his trilogy The Human Age. The first volume, The Childermass, published in 1928, is a conspicuously “modernist” work–difficult, disjointed, disorienting–whereas the final two volumes, written after the war, are straightforwardly realistic’ (Adam Hammond, paper presented in a panel on ‘The Role of the Artist in the Local Landscape: Examining Marshall McLuhan and Sheila Watson’s Relationship to Canadian Modernism,’ at the MEA Annual Convention, ‘Space, Place, and the McLuhan Legacy,’ 23–6 June 2011, University of Alberta).
42 ‘I am no longer able to teach a story of the world which they would find acceptable; they would not let me teach my students the things which I now know, so I have to tell them that there is no longer anything that I can teach … No, the die, I fear, is cast, I have to find other employment. That would be very difficult in England … You may ask, cannot I think differently? Why, can I not purge myself of this order of things? Well, of course there are some things that everyone thinks which hot irons could not burn out of them. It is the circumstances of the time in which we live which have made it impossible for me to mistake my road: there have been signposts or rather lurid beacons all the way along it, leading to only one end, to one conclusion. How anyone, as historically informed as I am, can come to any very different conclusions from my own I find it hard to understand. They must have blind eyes for all the flaming signs’ (Lewis, Self Condemned, 39–40, 41–2).
43 ‘The numbers, the mass of strangers, does not matter, they might as well be stones. Indeed, the thicker the mass of stony strangers the deeper the wilderness. Then the fact that Canada is four-fifths an authentic wilderness does not matter. It would be the same emptiness anywhere. The same ghastly void, next door to nothingness … I have no particular reason to go to Canada. I must go somewhere out of sight of what is going to happen because I know so well the reasons which make it impossible for it not to occur. How disgusting, how maddening, and how foully comic all the reality of death and destruction will be; I just cannot stick around here and watch that going on. Canada is as good, or as bad a place as any other. The problem is, to get out of the world I have always known, which is as good to say of the world. So Canada is to be my grave’ (Lewis, Self Condemned, 172).
44 Fox, ‘The Wild Land,’ in Woodcock, ed., Wyndham Lewis in Canada, 43.
45 Lewis, Filibusters in Barbary, in Journey into Barbary, 75.
46 Ibid., 71.
47 ‘The world-slump that hit America with the velocity of a Tornado, spewed out on to the streets millions of decent people, not necessarily passionately nomad … So the enthusiastic Frenchmen, who point to Casablanca as the “pearl of the French Renaissance,” and emphasize that it is a great city upon the latest transatlantic model, could even, if they wished, adduce the existence of Bidonville, to make the flattering comparison even more apposite! It is a parallelism which is, however, in no way dishonourable for the French, for their Hobo-town is the creation of born nomads, who are, by choice, the inhabitants of a tent or a caboose. No capitalist laws could drive them out of these hovels. It is different in the case of War-debt Drive, in the Hobo-town upon the shores of Lake Michigan. There our White stock is being forced down into a semi-savage sub-world of the down-and-out, or Untermensch. It is being thrown back into Barbary – not invited to issue out of Barbary into the advantageous plane of the civilized European life’ (Lewis, Journey into Barbary, 71–2).
48 Eliot, The Waste Land.
49 Lewis, Journey into Barbary, 56.
50 McLuhan, Letters, 245.
51 McLuhan, Counterblast (1954).
52 McLuhan, Counterblast (1969), 5.
1 Medawar, The Hope of Progress, 31. See chapter 1 in this volume, ‘A Renewed Approach to Marshall McLuhan’s Poetics.’
2 McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, 7.
3 Ibid., viii. See also chapter 4 of this volume, ‘Let the Guru Resound.’
4 Carpenter, ‘Remembering Explorations,’ 7.
5 McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, 128.
6 Ibid., 216.
7 Ibid., 129–30.
8 McLuhan and Watson, From Cliché to Archetype, 19–21.
9 See Battistini, ed., Letteratura e scienza, 2ff.
10 Capra, The Tao of Physics, 43. See chapter 4 of this volume, ‘Let the Guru Resound.’
11 Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science, 3–5.
12 Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, 7.
13 McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, 3.
14 Medawar, The Hope of Progress, 25. See chapter 1 of this volume, ‘A Renewed Approach to Marshall McLuhan’s Poetics.’
15 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 393, 384.
16 See ibid., 395.
17 Ibid., 383.
18 Cronenberg, David Cronenberg: Interviews with Serge Grunberg, 66.
19 Ballard, Introduction, in Crash (1995), 4.
20 McLuhan, Counterblast (1954).
21 Video McLuhan 3 – 1972–1979.
22 Marshall McLuhan: The Man and His Message. video, dir. Stephanie McLuhan-Ortved, 1984.
23 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 70.
24 Marshall McLuhan: The Man and His Message. dir. Stephanie McLuhan-Ortved, 1984.
25 Cronenberg, David Cronenberg: Interviews with Serge Grunberg, 70–1.
26 Video McLuhan 6, York University, 1979.
27 Alfano Miglietti, Identità mutanti, 11.
28 Ibid., 13.
29 See Berger, Téléovision: Le nouveau Golem; Hall, The Hidden Dimension.
30 See Granata, Arte, estetica e nuovi media.
31 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 257.
32 See McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 37.
33 Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 45.
34 Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors, 575.
35 McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, v.
36 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 66.
37 ‘Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media,’ Playboy, March 1969, p. 72.
38 McLuhan, Counterblast (1954).
39 McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, 35
40 Video McLuhan 3 – 1972–1979.
1 In Video McLuhan 3 – 1972–1979, McLuhan comments explicitly on his use of ‘the right hemisphere.’
2 McLuhan, ‘The Brain and the Media: The “Western Hemisphere,”’ 54.
3 McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, 70.
4 Theall, The Medium Is the Rear-View Mirror, 112, 113.
5 Ibid., xviii.
6 Ibid., xvi.
7 See Schickel, ‘Marshall McLuhan: Canada’s Intellectual Comet.’
8 Nevitt and McLuhan, Who Was Marshall McLuhan? Exploring a Mosaic of Impressions, 187.
9 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 315.
10 McLuhan, Counterblast, 28.
11 Ford, The Critical Attitude, 113–14. (See also p. 165 of the present volume.)
12 McLuhan, Letters, 44. See chapter 8 in this volume, ‘From Literature to Media.’
13 Ford, The Critical Attitude, 8.
14 Ford, Introduction to A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway, in Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, 134.
15 Poe, A Descent into the Maesltrom, 2–3.