1997

 

 

  • Carey, James. “The Roots of Modern Media Analysis: Lewis Mumford and Marshall McLuhan.” The James Carey Reader . Eds. Eve Stryker Munson and Catherine A. Warren. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.

 

  • Farmelo, Graham. “Collected Works [review].” New Scientist 155 (September 20 1997): 55.

“A guru, that’s what the information technology revolution needs – someone to make sense of it all, to put it into perspective. The Canadian media-studies luminary Marshall McLuhan is one candidate. The only problem is that he’d been dead for ten years when the Internet took off.
“Today, McLuhan’s thoughts on the media seem more insightful than ever. He is, however, more discussed than read, so HardWired have done us a favour in reissuing two digitally remastered versions of his most accessible books, coauthored with the graphic designer Quentin Fiore.
” The Medium is the Massage , first published in 1967, is as stimulating a coffee-time read as you’re likely to come across. It’s a characteristically gnomic and imaginative review of the media and interfaces between them, and Fiore’s graphics are almost as striking as McLuhan’s text. The title, by the way, is a typical McLuhanesque play on words: the media, he believes, ‘work us over completely’, like a massage.
“McLuhan’s War and Peace in the Global Village appeared a year later and is harder going although just as rewarding in the end. Here, he examines the modern history of war, which he argues is ‘a sizeable component in the educational industry’. Bizarre ? Yes, but if you bear with him, he has a way of making epigrams like this perfectly plausible, even profound. He’s like a technologically obsessed Oscar Wilde, without the wit.”

 

  • Gordon, Terence W.. Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding . Toronto: Stoddart, 1997.

54: “The television medium forces the use of what McLuhan later referred to as the ‘ear-view mirror,’ because the eye never receives a complete picture from the screen, just as the ear never receives a word in isolation from a stream of speech.”

 

  • Hutton, Patrick. ” Writing and European Thought 1600-1830 [review].”Canadian Journal of History 32.2 (August 1997): 305-7.

305: “Nicholas Hudson has written a history of writing, today a surprisingly neglected topic. But indirectly he is taking issue with the position of Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong on the orality/literacy question, which has inspired such intense interest in our times. McLuhan and Ong present orality and literacy as stages in the historical development of technologies of communication – from the ancient cultures of primary orality to the modern ones of electronic literacy via stages of manuscript, then print literacy.

“Hudson takes a different tack. He argues that writing and speaking have coexisted in their evolution throughout history. Whenever we revisit a particular moment in the past, we encounter the tension between them. Hudson takes the early modern period – from the Renaissance to Romanticism – to explore this encounter. It is, of course, the era in which print succeeded in displacing manuscript literacy as the principal mode for the dissemination of knowledge.”

 

  • Kizuk, Alexander. “‘Mutual Provisionality”: Plurality and the Other in Canadian Cultural Theory.” Essays on Canadian Writing 61 (Spring 1997): 104-24.

“It could be argued that despite McLuhan’s shift from the what of domination to the how, his categorical thought cannot, in fact, distinguish his various binarisms from the colonialistic or colonized binary operative in Smith and Frye. True, McLuhan deferred to the American cultural hegemony, and the influence of Roman Catholicism, to which he converted as an adult, cannot be denied. However, in his thought, there is a shift from hierarchal thinking in which Self and Other, body and soul, and so forth are opposed, to a modular orientation in which many selves or bodies or even nations may exist within the amniotic fluid of modern culture. For McLuhan, all binaries are capable of disintegrating into pluralities. The illegitimate myths of hoi polloi can exist as in a mosaic beside great codes without conflict because alterity and Self are not cognitively
opposed.”

 

  • Koven, Mikel. “Voices from the Periphery: Videodrome and the (Pre)Postmodern Vision of Marshall McLuhan.” Postscript: A Journal of Graduate School Criticism and Theory 4.1 (1997): 25-37.

 

  • Tandt, Christophe. “McLuhan, Pynchon, Gibson: The Informational Metropolis from the Global Village to Cyberspace.” European Contributions to American Studies 38 (1997): 103-10.

 

  • Tremblay, Tony. “‘Reading ‘McLuhan’ in a Postmodern Age: The Construction of Glenn Willmott, Terry Gordon, Robert Logan, and Derrick de Kerckhove.'”Antigonish Review 110 (1997): 143-57.