The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism Of Marshall Mcluhan

by Marshall McLuhan, Eugene McNamara (Editor)

Of all our principal public and publicized thinkers, Marshall McLuhan is probably the most confused. The development of this confusion can be traced chronologically in "The Interior Landscape," a brilliant collection of literary essays dating from 1943. Its full flowering is displayed in the melange of liturgically repeated formulas which dominate "Counterblast."

239 pages, Unknown Binding

Published January 1, 1971

About the author

Herbert 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.

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

A piece of criticism that speaks with the persuasive voice of towering Alexandrian erudition, so strongly that to even "get" most of it intimate acquaintance with and knowledge of the poems, novels and authors in question is required. The book is composed of a series of non-chronological essays, subdivided in three thematic chapters: one on "Nets of Analogy", ie. poetic structures analogical to technological ("medial") developments occurring in society at large, with Joyce, Mallarmé, Poe and others as coryphees; one on "The Beatrician Moment", ie. the pre-Newton tendency in poetry of evoking singular moments of arrest, as opposed to the both ancient and modern "symbolical" tradition of creating external landscapes to mirror states of being; and, lastly, one on the specific qualities of and differences between literature in the Poe/Faulkner-led American South and the Melville/Hemingwayian North.

McLuhan's most ambitious task is to conscript all these remarks and tendencies in the larger ever-evolving literary fabric, evidence of which he sees everywhere - as readers of his other works know. Tackling Poe leads to exploration of Socrates and the Sophists, Seneca, scholasticism and dialectics; in the differences between Coleridge and Wordsworth he spies an early hint of burgeoning modernist symbolism; an examination of Faulkner gives way to historical ponderings on Hibernian migrations, Joyce, the Civil War, John Dewey and Robert Hutchins and the ongoing war in US education paradigms. Seeing as these larger weaves require less specialized knowledge, McLuhan's theories on them are probably more interesting to those without PhD's in literature than his study of rhythm in Keats is. Indeed, those looking for an extension of McLuhan's media philosophy into the realm of literature - after all, he intensively and extensively quotes Joyce as another would Chomsky or Spengler - will find traces of these thoughts in some of his literary-historical ruminations; McLuhanian jargon such as "cold/hot", "extension", "narcosis" and "implosion" is, however, completely absent.