Marshall McLuhan was dubbed a media guru when he came to prominence
in the 1960s. The Woodstock generation found him cool; their
parents found him perplexing. Today he is often referred to as a
media ecologist, a phrase that would have pleased him for its
resonance with James Joyces Echoland. Joyces kaleidoscopic verbal
creativity stimulated McLuhans vision for a unified explanation of
everything from Woodstock to Wall Street, from woodcuts to weapons,
in terms of media and their effects. During his career, he found
time to write about high literature (Chesterton, Wyndham Lewis,
Pound, Joyce) and popular culture (movies, comics, and
advertising), managing even to explore the link between them in
reviewing the work of his arch-rival Northrop Frye (Inside Blake
and Hollywood). By 1963 McLuhan was Director of the Centre for
Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto and would be a
public intellectual on the international stage for more than a
decade, then linked forever to his two best known coinages: the
global village and the medium is the message.Both phrases express a
paradox. We easily interpret the first as an image for our planet
dramatically shrunken by the powerful media of instant
communication. Broadband buzz and G3 gossip. For this we scarcely
need McLuhan. But the medium is the message has an unsettling
counter-intuitive quality that provoked critical commentaries many
of startling irrelevance to McLuhans thrust and purpose. Legions of
bewildered students and intimidated faculty may have kept silent,
and McLuhans many interviewers often merely registered irritation,
but Jonathan Miller and Umberto Eco were among the luminaries who
lodged vigorous protests, stumbling over McLuhans metaphor for how
media operate and how they shape and control the speed, scale, and
forms of human association and action. This was the key idea at the
core of his Understanding Media. Even as Understanding Media was
launched, McLuhan was raiding psychology, philosophy,
structuralism, and taking second plunder from literary studies. By
the end of his career, he had harnessed the complementarities of
figure/ground, cause/effect, structure/function, and
clich/archetype to his earlier work. Their full and final
expression was achieved in the posthumously published Laws of
Media. Taken as a whole, McLuhans writings reveal a profound
coherence and illuminate his unifying vision for the study of
language, literature, and culture, grounded in the broad
understanding of any medium or technology as an extension of the
human body. McLuhan: A Guide for the Perplexed is a close reading
of all of his work with a focus on tracing the systematic
development of his thought. The overriding objective is to clarify
all of McLuhans thinking, to consolidate it in a fashion which
prevents misreadings, and to open the way to advancing his own
program: ensuring that the world does not sleepwalk into the
twenty-first century with nineteenth-century perceptions.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
