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| Marshall McLuhan: |
| Understanding Media |
| The Extensions of Man (Critical Edition) |
| Edited by W. Terrence Gordon |
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| When first published, Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media made history with its radical view of the effects of electronic communications upon man and life in the twentieth century. This edition of McLuhan’s best-known book both enhances its accessibility to a general audience and provides the full critical apparatus necessary for scholars. In Terrence Gordon’s own words, “McLuhan is in full flight already in the introduction, challenging us to plunge with him into what he calls ‘the creative process of knowing.’” Much to the chagrin of his contemporary critics McLuhan’s preference was for a prose style that explored rather than explained. Probes, or aphorisms, were an indispensable tool with which he sought to prompt and prod the reader into an "understanding of how media operate" and to provoke reflection.
In the 1960s McLuhan’s theories aroused both wrath and admiration. It is intriguing to speculate what he might have to say 40 years later on subjects to which he devoted whole chapters such as Television, The Telephone, Weapons, Housing and Money. Today few would dispute that mass media have indeed decentralized modern living and turned the world into a global village.
This critical edition features an appendix that makes available for the first time the core of the research project that spawned the book and individual chapter notes are supported by a glossary of terms, indices of subjects, names, and works cited. There is also a complete bibliography of McLuhan’s published works.
W. Terrence Gordon is Associate General Editor of the Gingko Press McLuhan publishing program, author of the biography Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding and McLuhan for Beginners.
Reaction to the first edition was as highly charged as the book itself:
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“Marshall McLuhan is now a power in more than one land.”
— The New Statesman |
“Infuriating, brilliant and incoherent.”
— Commonwealth Review |
“His critics are infuriated by his ideas
... but some think his foretell our real future.”
— Richard Schickel, Harper's |
“The medium is not the message ...”
— Umberto Eco |
“What if he is right?”
— Tom Wolfe |
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640 pages, Hardcover, 5 1/4'' x 7 1/2'' (133 x 191 mm),
English
ISBN: 978-1-58423-073-1 $ 24.95 |
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| About the Editor: |
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| W. Terrence Gordon was born in Montreal in 1942. He studied at the University of Toronto, where he received his undergraduate and graduate degrees. He is the author of 17 published books and over 130 articles in the fields of linguistics, pedagogy, rhetoric, semiotics, and intellectual history. |
| Since 1972, Gordon has been on the faculty of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, teaching courses in linguistics, translation, the role of radio in World War II, and, of course, the work of Marshall McLuhan. |
| Author of the highly successful McLuhan for Beginners, W. Terrence Gordon has edited a critical edition of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media and McLuhan’s doctoral thesis, The Classical Trivium. |
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| About the Author: |
| Marshall McLuhan |
| One of the most controversial and original thinkers of our time, McLuhan is universally regarded as the father of communications and media studies.
But he is far more than that. A charismatic figure, whose remarkable perception propelled him onto the international stage, McLuhan became the prophet of the new information age.
In his own time he drew both accolades and criticism for his intuitive vision, his steady stream of thought-provoking metaphors, and fast-forward glimpses into a world where software would eclipse hardware and the power of mass media would eclipse the power of government. The information superhighway fulfilled his perceptive observation that the world would ultimately become a "global village."
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| Official Website: |
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The Marshall McLuhan Estate |
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| watch: Marshall McLuhan Speaks |
| Other Websites: |
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| Marshall McLuhan Salon |
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Marshall McLuhan / Finnegans
Wake Reading Club |
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Virtual Maastricht
McLuhan Institute (VMMI) |
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| See also: |
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| McLuhan: From Cliché to Archetype |
| In these pages, readers learn how to look at stale clichés with fresh eyes, as artists do, and discover that clichés provide the key to understanding Modernism, from the puns of James Joyce to Ionesco’s Theater of the Absurd. more... |
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| McLuhan: The Classical Trivium |
| In this previously unpublished work, a young Marshall McLuhan, as cultural historian, illuminates the complexities of the classical trivium, provides the first ever close reading of the enigmatic Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe, and implicitly challenges the reader to accept a new blueprint for literary education. more... |
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Marshall McLuhan – Escape Into
Understanding: A Biography |
| More than just a detailed life story, this fine and carefully written biography actually does justice to McLuhan’s ideas. Gordon evocatively portrays McLuhan’s central place in the ferment of the 1960s and explains the formation of his brilliant insights into the media. more... |
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