Letters of Marshall McLuhan

by Corinne McLuhan and Marshall McLuhan

Book Overview

Coiner of the famous phrase "the medium is the message" and author of two widely read, controversial volumes--The Guttenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media--Marshall McLuhan was one of the most talked about personalities of the 1960s. He appeared on the cover of Newsweek and The Saturday Review, was written about in Time, Life, The Nation, The New Yorker, and The National Review, was the subject of an hour-long documentary on NBC, and had an unforgettable walk-on role in Woody Allen's Annie Hall, playing himself. A seminal thinker, he introduced popular culture as a subject for serious thought, and started people thinking about how technology--especially electronic media--shapes the way we perceive the world.
McLuhan corresponded with a vast number of people, from Hubert Humphrey and Jimmy Carter to popular advice columnist Ann Landers. Indeed, his correspondents amount to a Who's Who of western culture, both high and low, including Duke Ellington, Woody Allen, Jacques Maritain, Rollo May, Susan Sontag, Eugene Ionesco, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and Bob Newhart. At times playful and at times profound, his letters offer an invaluable commentary on McLuhan's work and, in some instances, the most lucid and detailed explanation of his ideas available.
A brilliant letter-writer and a genial man who made friends all over the world, Marshall McLuhan left behind a correspondence that brims with insight, good humor, and the love of language and word play. His letters offer an invaluable glimpse of the private life and inner thoughts of one of the great minds of the twentieth century.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195405943
• ISBN13: 9780195405941
• Release Date: March 1987
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 576 Pages
• Weight: 2.12 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.5" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

To the point of absurdity, but still true enough

McLuhan is a comic hero for me. What seemed mysterious about McLuhan's mirth, when I was merely reading his books, might be even worse, now that I can`t stop thinking about how he topped everyone else, driven, as only a McLuhan fan would be, into trying to explain how Marshall McLuhan writing letters, attempting to explain his wildly radical ideas to the people of his world, ought to be understood as being comic, like a light-saber stab at grasping things that extended far beyond irony. Collapse might be the word that is used so often in this book that, if it had been listed in the Index, the Index would have been more than 15 pages.To understand modern society as a comic society, it helps to get beyond the famous comedians, movie stars, and around the little kid characters of `South Park' who attempt, in a thoroughly juvenile manner, to create their own involvement in modern life. In the intellectual direction, Marshall McLuhan stands as a character possessing a level of thought which allows LETTERS OF MARSHALL McLUHAN to be a prime example of humor in action. This might not be the perfect book for every reader, but it coincides nicely with my appreciation of how entertainment values resonate with real life. This review is not an attempt to achieve some overall evaluation of this book. Out of spite, I will try the opposite approach, emphasizing the idiosyncratic abuse of intellect as a weapon used by Marshall McLuhan to attack everything which any superpower would attempt to do while disguising itself as ordinary.There are several dozen references in the book to Canada, CBC, CBC-TV, and CRTC (Canadian Radio-Television Commission). McLuhan certainly felt enough at home there to enjoy himself by sending Pierre Elliott Trudeau a letter on January 5, 1973, which began:Dear Pierre,A one-liner that is very flexible in its use goes: "As Zeus said to Narcissus: `Watch yourself!' " (p. 461).At a time when the major powers were moving towards signing a ceasefire agreement in Paris, McLuhan was trying to draw attention to Viet Nam as a resonant interval, where the action is, a gap, an interface, understood as the political game, which is considered a game because it "would seem to be rooted in the awareness of `play' as crux in all forms of social action. It is a basic feature of play that it keeps us in touch, and is also extremely involving of our facilities." (p. 461). One of the key failures of the United States in Nam was the lack of success in imposing the official American policy on the views of those who were totally involved. Policy was set by top officials in meetings in which the top priorities were more concerned about global geopolitics, which is bound to stumble in a world that McLuhan was trying to describe to Trudeau as being much more complex, especially to individuals:"When we are using only a small part of our faculties, we are working. When we are totally involved, we are playing. The artist is always at leisure, especia