Marshall McLuhan Libri

Exploring the intricacies of the classical trivium, this unpublished work by a young Marshall McLuhan serves as a cultural history that delves into literary education. It offers a detailed examination of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric, revealing their vital roles in classical learning. Through a close reading of Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe, McLuhan uncovers the connections between various literary traditions from Cicero to the sixteenth century, laying the groundwork for his later media theories.

The essay is for exploring; the book, for explaining. Such was McLuhan's philosophy about these two forms. The essy is the freer form, better suited to exploration than the longer meditation, the book. This collection puts the reader in the place of colleague and co-researcher. Not just another compilation of articles and interviews, McLuhan Unbound contains off-prints of the original essays. See how the two McLuhans, the literary academic and the public media expert, are really one. Some of these articles were written before the subsequent book was envisioned: they are prliminary forays iinto new territory. Some were written after the book and encapsulate major themes; some set out additional discoveries or matters left out of the book; others present material discovered as a result of writing the book. The McLuhan Unbound offprints series is not the last word in presenting McLuhan's ideas and discoveries, but the first.

Theories of Communication is the realization of a project begun in the 1970s with Marshall McLuhan and now brought to completion by his son, Eric McLuhan. This collection of short essays assembles theories of communication from a diverse range of famous people – from Thomas Aquinas and Francis Bacon to Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound – and ends with an essay on Marshall McLuhann’ own theory of communication. While the majority of the essays have been previously published, all are seminal pieces in the field. Their presence together in one volume is a significant contribution to the overall task of understanding culture and communication in our time, and will appeal to both scholars and students interested in the work of Marshall McLuhan.

Media studies has been catching up with McLuhan over the last 50 years. These essays are drawn from themost productive quarter-century of his career (1952-1978), anddemonstrate his abiding interest in the materiality of mediation, from comic books to fashion, from technology to biology.Anchoring these essays are four meditations on the work of hisgreat predecessor, Harold adams innis, who first proposed thecentrality of mediation to every facet of our daily lives. McLuhan took this task literally; rejecting the specialist approachof academic study, he published in mainstream magazinessuch as Look and Harper's Bazaar on topics such as sexualityand the fashion industry, in each case bringing to these topics insights that remain startlinglyfresh. The essays offer a rare glimpse into a great mind as it works out the implications of theeffects of media not only on what we know but on how we are coming to understand our being.

More than 40 years after its initial release, "The Medium is the Massage" returns in hardcover to celebrate the McLuhan Centenary. This influential classic highlights McLuhan's insights on media's pervasive impact on society, emphasizing that media shape societies more than the content they convey.

Say the name Marshall McLuhan and you think of the great discover's explorations of the media. But throughout his life, McLuhan never stopped reflecting profoundly on the nature of God and worship, and on the traditions of the Church. Often other intellectuals and artists would ask him incredulously, Are you really a Catholic? He would answer, Yes, I am a Catholic, the worst kind -- a convert, leaving them more baffled than before. Here, like a golden thread lining his public utterances on the media, are McLuhan's brilliant probes into the nature of conversion, the church's understanding of media, the shape of tomorrow's church, religion and youth, and the God-making machines of the modern world. This fascinating collection, gathered from his many and scattered remarks, essays, and other writings, shows the deeply Christian side of a man widely considered the most important thinker of our time, a man whose insights into media and culture have revolutionized the field of media study and the way we see the world.

The theme of McLuhan's book is the distinction between two quite different traditions of reasoning which have grown up in Western and Eastern countries, and how global communications have brought these two traditions into contact.

Marshall McLuhan is celebrated as one of Canada's most original thinkers, with works like The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media establishing his global reputation and influencing our grasp of modern communication. In his later years, he collaborated with his son, Eric McLuhan, on a 'unified field' theory of human culture. This collaboration aims to retrieve an ancient understanding of the world, rooted in the power of 'logos' and its role in shaping culture and media. They argue that the invention of the alphabet led to a preference for visual conceptualizations over acoustic ones, exploring the differences between the brain's hemispheres and employing Gestalt theories to define media. The term 'media,' central to McLuhan's thought, is examined broadly, encompassing all human creations—artefacts, ideas, and innovations, from computer programs to everyday objects. The McLuhans introduce a tetrad of four questions applicable to any artefact or idea: What does it enhance? What does it render obsolete? What does it retrieve? What does it produce when pushed to extremes? Each human innovation answers these questions, and those that do not are not considered products of human creativity. Their laws provide a new scientific foundation for media studies, enabling prediction and encompassing all human activities. This New Science redefines our understanding of human creation and offers a vision for reshaping the future.

This reissue of Understanding Media marks the thirtieth anniversary (1964-1994) of Marshall McLuhan's classic expose on the state of the then emerging phenomenon of mass media. Terms and phrases such as "the global village" and "the medium is the message" are now part of the lexicon, and McLuhan's theories continue to challenge our sensibilities and our assumptions about how and what we communicate.