mywebcowtube | Marshall McLuhan 1977 Explaining and listening to William Buttler Yeats @webcowiv | Uploaded June 2016 | Updated October 2024, 4 hours ago.
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In Cambridge McLuhan also encountered major critics — especially F. R. Leavis and I. A. Richards — who were intimately connected with literary Modernism. If today literature and criticism seem to be running on parallel tracks, rarely threatening to meet, such was not the case in the early twentieth century. For one thing, some of the most important poets — T. S. Eliot above all, but also Ezra Pound — were deeply influential critics as well. But more decisive was the willingness of professors to intervene in literary disputes as champions of certain authors and styles. For instance, Leavis celebrated D. H. Lawrence as a worthy heir of what he called “The Great Tradition,” while Richards allied himself with the more experimental Modernists, such as Eliot, who returned the favor by citing his work in their criticism.
McLuhan seems to have adopted Leavis’s assured lawgiving manner, while embracing Richards’s critical judgments. The writers Richards celebrated — James Joyce and Ezra Pound especially — became touchstones for McLuhan, and later for some of his students and younger colleagues (including the brilliant polymathic literary critic Hugh Kenner). But it is vital to understand, if we wish to grasp these thinkers’ influence on McLuhan, that the Modernists were anything but sympathetic to the basic character of the modern world. Eliot commended Joyce’s Ulysses because he thought that it found a way to address “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history”; he envied the writers of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras because they “possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience,” a power of assimilating everything that might happen to someone — a power we have lost: “in the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered.”
Similarly, Ezra Pound celebrated the Troubadours and Trouveres of twelfth-century Provence, along with certain ancient Greek and Chinese poets, for finding a comprehensively elegant style that he felt was impossible in his own day. For much the same reason, William Butler Yeats longed for “the holy city of Byzantium”: “I think if I could be given a month of Antiquity and leave to spend it where I chose, I would spend it in Byzantium a little before Justinian opened St. Sophia and closed the Academy of Plato.... I think that in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic and practical life were one.” The great Modernists were united in little but their distaste for their own period, and their sense that it offered them few and shabby resources in comparison to what many of their distant predecessors had been able to draw upon.
This lesson too was not lost on McLuhan. Everything he wrote that would make him famous he wrote as a professor of English literature, rooted as a scholar in the technological, scientific, and religious upheavals of the early-modern world, and fascinated as a thinker by the immensely ambitious attempts of the great Modernists to use the resources of the past to respond, critically but constructively, to the twentieth century. Perhaps the best way to think of McLuhan is as a belated Modernist: born a generation or so later than Eliot, Pound, and Joyce, and working in a different intellectual medium than they worked in, but one with them in interest and ambition. The Gutenberg Galaxy is as much a document of magisterial Modernism as Ulysses, the Cantos, or The Waste Land.
More information:
thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-bother-with-marshall-mcluhan
mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com
marshallmcluhanspeaks.com
mcluhanonmaui.com
Description:
In Cambridge McLuhan also encountered major critics — especially F. R. Leavis and I. A. Richards — who were intimately connected with literary Modernism. If today literature and criticism seem to be running on parallel tracks, rarely threatening to meet, such was not the case in the early twentieth century. For one thing, some of the most important poets — T. S. Eliot above all, but also Ezra Pound — were deeply influential critics as well. But more decisive was the willingness of professors to intervene in literary disputes as champions of certain authors and styles. For instance, Leavis celebrated D. H. Lawrence as a worthy heir of what he called “The Great Tradition,” while Richards allied himself with the more experimental Modernists, such as Eliot, who returned the favor by citing his work in their criticism.
McLuhan seems to have adopted Leavis’s assured lawgiving manner, while embracing Richards’s critical judgments. The writers Richards celebrated — James Joyce and Ezra Pound especially — became touchstones for McLuhan, and later for some of his students and younger colleagues (including the brilliant polymathic literary critic Hugh Kenner). But it is vital to understand, if we wish to grasp these thinkers’ influence on McLuhan, that the Modernists were anything but sympathetic to the basic character of the modern world. Eliot commended Joyce’s Ulysses because he thought that it found a way to address “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history”; he envied the writers of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras because they “possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience,” a power of assimilating everything that might happen to someone — a power we have lost: “in the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered.”
Similarly, Ezra Pound celebrated the Troubadours and Trouveres of twelfth-century Provence, along with certain ancient Greek and Chinese poets, for finding a comprehensively elegant style that he felt was impossible in his own day. For much the same reason, William Butler Yeats longed for “the holy city of Byzantium”: “I think if I could be given a month of Antiquity and leave to spend it where I chose, I would spend it in Byzantium a little before Justinian opened St. Sophia and closed the Academy of Plato.... I think that in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic and practical life were one.” The great Modernists were united in little but their distaste for their own period, and their sense that it offered them few and shabby resources in comparison to what many of their distant predecessors had been able to draw upon.
This lesson too was not lost on McLuhan. Everything he wrote that would make him famous he wrote as a professor of English literature, rooted as a scholar in the technological, scientific, and religious upheavals of the early-modern world, and fascinated as a thinker by the immensely ambitious attempts of the great Modernists to use the resources of the past to respond, critically but constructively, to the twentieth century. Perhaps the best way to think of McLuhan is as a belated Modernist: born a generation or so later than Eliot, Pound, and Joyce, and working in a different intellectual medium than they worked in, but one with them in interest and ambition. The Gutenberg Galaxy is as much a document of magisterial Modernism as Ulysses, the Cantos, or The Waste Land.
More information:
thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-bother-with-marshall-mcluhan
mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com
marshallmcluhanspeaks.com
mcluhanonmaui.com
