Week 2
Media Studies Methods
This week will focus on Marshall McLuhan's influence on 20th century media studies, particularly in relationship to literature. Below are some links to watch and listen to his lectures as well as explore some of the problem dynamics McLuhan envisioned as part of merging the study of literature with critical analysis of media.
Scroll to the bottom of the page to see some of McLuhan's lectures.
Marshall McLuhan's Biography
Born in 1911 and died in 1980, McLuhan was a Canadian born English professor who focused on media and media theory. His relationship to literature is clear from Marchessault's claim that "Marshall McLuhan should be considered to have been first and foremost an English professor. His intellectual formation in English Studies at Cambridge University deeply influenced his methodological approaches to the media. To begin a study on McLuhan it is crucial to understand that his concept of the media, a term he made famous, starts with an awareness of the materiality of language, with language as technology (3)."
McLuhan’s distinctive interdisciplinary style of writing on media aligns him with a post-war generation of cultural theorists – Raymond Williams, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco and, most especially, with Harold Innis. Yet, his early carrier began as a medievalist who focused on the trivium (the three primary of the seven Liberal Arts, grammar, logic (dialectic), and rhetoric) and it's influence in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
Only later in his career (1960s) did his attention shift to media and the effects, particularly the utilitarian culture of late the Victorian period that required literary studies to some how be "useful." Along with other "New Critics" like John Crowe Ransom in the US and I. A. Richards (McLuhan's teacher a Cambridge), McLuhan sought another path for literature and literary criticism, which explored not the historical or cultural relationship between literature and it's time, but the formal aspects of a work as well as the present or contemporary "effects" (particularly psychological, social, and cultural) of what happens when a person engages a work of art. More pedagogical than esoteric, New Criticism's influence on McLuhan's style should not be underestimated.
After his doctoral dissertation on the trivium and his first book on the "folklore of industrial man" (The Mechanical Bride, 1951), McLuhan's first foray into media studies began with The Gutenberg Galaxy, which explored the effects of print on culture. The emphasis on sight, discrete units, and visual knowledge that appeared with print could not be underestimated. His proverbial writing style (see famous quotes below) and broad range of examples (see methodology below)--rather than a traditional literary criticism-- was shunned by many academics since the style appeared to be for a popular rather than academic audience. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) continued his education of mass culture (along with television interviews, art book projects, and magazine essays). Divided into two parts, Understanding Media first introduced the theoretic framework media as "extension of the body" that bring with them entire categories of understanding that are not translatable into new media. The human sensorium adapts to media until it (the medium) becomes an extension of the body and cognitive processes. Any introduction of a new medium solves a problem of an old medium while simultaneously introducing new sense ratios that were unimaginable through an older medium and the culture that grew up around it. In part two of Understanding Media, McLuhan catalogues various media--speech, writing, money, clocks, bombs, and robots--and their shifting social and psychological effects on humans as extended animals the environment,
His later books, and his ideas generally, where shunned in both the classroom and the public sphere so much so that Marchessault writes, " As an undergraduate studying communications in Canada in the late 1970s, I was told to stay away from McLuhan. The Gutenberg Galaxy was said to be nonsense, Understanding Media was all wrong, and the later McLuhan essays were bad art. McLuhan’s first book, The Mechanical Bride was never mentioned (46)." It was only with the appearance of the internet did media studies return to McLuhan's formal analysis--in the mean time German media theorists like Friedrich Kittler became prominent--and explore some of his ideas in relation to the new information age.
For more, see Janine Marchessault, Marshall McLuhan. London: Sage, 2006.
McLuhan's Quotes:
― “The medium is the message.”
― “Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement.”
―“The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.”
―"We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us."
―"When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result."
―"Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment."
―"The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village."
