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The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time
In this previously unpublished work, a young Marshall McLuhan, as cultural historian, illuminates the complexities of the classical trivium, provides the first ever close reading of the enigmatic Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe, and implicitly challenges the reader to accept a new blueprint for literary education. Ideas that would ground McLuhan's media analysis of the 1960s and 70s are here in embryo, as he sets out in scrupulous detail the role of grammar (interpretation), dialectic, and rhetoric in classical learning. Under McLuhan's scholarly microscope, the internal dynamics of the trivium and its purpose are revealed. As is its indispensable role in giving full due to the rich prose of Thomas Nashe. In ranging over literature from Cicero to the sixteenth century, McLuhan discovers the source and significance of multiple traditions in Nashe's writings. Here, more than half a century after it was written, is a fresh, insightful, and richly coherent framework for studying Nashe and an unequivocal call for a program of education based on the ambitious and lofty ideal of reintegrating the classical trivium.
276 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2006
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About the author
Marshall McLuhan
119 books918 followersHerbert Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. He studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge. He began his teaching career as a professor of English at several universities in the United States and Canada before moving to the University of Toronto in 1946, where he remained for the rest of his life. He is known as the "father of media studies".
McLuhan coined the expression "the medium is the message" in the first chapter in his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and the term global village. He predicted the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented. He was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, though his influence began to wane in the early 1970s. In the years following his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles. However, with the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web, interest was renewed in his work and perspectives.
McLuhan coined the expression "the medium is the message" in the first chapter in his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and the term global village. He predicted the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented. He was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, though his influence began to wane in the early 1970s. In the years following his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles. However, with the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web, interest was renewed in his work and perspectives.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 9, 2021
Review of: The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time by Marshall McLuhan, W. Terrence Gordon (Editor)
Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), by popular reputation, is the great 20th Century guru of mass communication and of electronic media technologies. It is from his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man that we get our omnipresent metaphors of the Global Village and of surf-boarding electronic media.
Less known is that he started out as a nerdy specialist in classical and medieval literature. His Cambridge doctoral thesis, completed in 1943, lay dormant for half a century and was only published in 2009 under the title The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time. McLuhan later became famous for compressing highly complex ideas into snappy little sound-bites. Honoring his style, I compress the sweeping historical thrust of his doctoral thesis into four words: analogy’s triumph over logic. While this is a horrible oversimplification it does serve Dr. McLuhan with a dose of his own medicine. Moreover, analogy’s triumph over logic is the key insight I gain from his tracking of the waxing and waning over the centuries of culture-wide imbalances, periodic shifts and tipping points of dominance in the intellectual climate by one or another of the Trivium’s three components: Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic (or dialectic).
McLuhan later came to understand that now, in our electronic age it is Rhetoric that dominates with its mainly analogical approach to reasoning. This dominance would endure as the pressures of interconnectedness, enabled by electronic media technologies, would squeeze cultural diversity down into an ever more compressed state of a single planet-wide global village.
McLuhan’s thesis is one of those sweeping generalizations of oscillating cultural cycles that many historians treat with skepticism these days. Nevertheless, it has a certain didactic bite and I have found it useful in my own work for comparing and connecting the medieval with the modern. (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...)
Stepping into any of McLuhan’s better books, especially this one, is like stepping onto a labyrinthine network of cultural conveyor belts of the kind machined to carry all of human learning from one generation to the next, from one culture to another, winding and twisting their way across the gulf of centuries from deep antiquity and into an immediate tomorrow. What turns the gears and drives the belts is reasoning by analogy. And, as always in McLuhan, analogy reigns supreme. This is probably why in my own venture into the domain of medieval communication technology, I turned to the insights of his thesis to better understand that marvel of medieval communication media: the Cathedral of Chartres.
I found it very much worth my while and if you are willing to make the effort to spend a little time in the labyrinth, you will too.
Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), by popular reputation, is the great 20th Century guru of mass communication and of electronic media technologies. It is from his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man that we get our omnipresent metaphors of the Global Village and of surf-boarding electronic media.
Less known is that he started out as a nerdy specialist in classical and medieval literature. His Cambridge doctoral thesis, completed in 1943, lay dormant for half a century and was only published in 2009 under the title The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time. McLuhan later became famous for compressing highly complex ideas into snappy little sound-bites. Honoring his style, I compress the sweeping historical thrust of his doctoral thesis into four words: analogy’s triumph over logic. While this is a horrible oversimplification it does serve Dr. McLuhan with a dose of his own medicine. Moreover, analogy’s triumph over logic is the key insight I gain from his tracking of the waxing and waning over the centuries of culture-wide imbalances, periodic shifts and tipping points of dominance in the intellectual climate by one or another of the Trivium’s three components: Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic (or dialectic).
McLuhan later came to understand that now, in our electronic age it is Rhetoric that dominates with its mainly analogical approach to reasoning. This dominance would endure as the pressures of interconnectedness, enabled by electronic media technologies, would squeeze cultural diversity down into an ever more compressed state of a single planet-wide global village.
McLuhan’s thesis is one of those sweeping generalizations of oscillating cultural cycles that many historians treat with skepticism these days. Nevertheless, it has a certain didactic bite and I have found it useful in my own work for comparing and connecting the medieval with the modern. (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...)
Stepping into any of McLuhan’s better books, especially this one, is like stepping onto a labyrinthine network of cultural conveyor belts of the kind machined to carry all of human learning from one generation to the next, from one culture to another, winding and twisting their way across the gulf of centuries from deep antiquity and into an immediate tomorrow. What turns the gears and drives the belts is reasoning by analogy. And, as always in McLuhan, analogy reigns supreme. This is probably why in my own venture into the domain of medieval communication technology, I turned to the insights of his thesis to better understand that marvel of medieval communication media: the Cathedral of Chartres.
I found it very much worth my while and if you are willing to make the effort to spend a little time in the labyrinth, you will too.
January 8, 2023
McLuhan's dissertation as a young man at Cambridge, written simultaneously with his very private conversion to Catholicism. Surprisingly lucid history of the trivium's development from antiquity, lingering (of course) over Augustine and the scholastics.
September 6, 2009
McLuhan's Ph.D thesis, resurrected after 60 years in the U. Toronto library stacks. Who would have thought it? McLuhan in the process of becoming McLuhan.
Want to read
October 5, 2015Read a few pages in January 2015, but had to put it aside so I could finish my reading lists for preliminary exams.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews