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READINGS IN LANGUAGE
This new section features links to interesting, instructive, or thought-provoking readings about the English language. The selections could be anywhere from light and humorous to serious and scholarly, and they range widely from the reading, writing, listening, and speaking disciplines to the teaching and learning of English.
A welcome taunt to those who think they know who McLuhan was
Who was the real Marshall McLuhan, the idiosyncratic media savant who made the phrase “the medium is the message” a global byword in the 1960s and foresaw the emergence of a global village in two uncannily prescient books, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man?
In a newly released biography, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! (Atlas and Company, 216 pages), novelist Douglas Coupland offers a sympathetic but quirkish chronicle of the Canadian academic and modern thinker whose genius and delusions enabled him to foresee “the dimensions of an emerging global village in which the means of communication began to define and overwhelm the conversation.”
Says David Carr in “Marshall McLuhan: Media Savant,” his review of the biography that came out in the January 6, 2011 issue of The New York Times: “This is the kind of book that will deliver major annoyance to academics who have made a career out of deconstructing McLuhan’s effort to define the modern media ecosystem. But to a reader interested in a little serious fun, a dip into someone we pretend to understand but don’t really know, You Know Nothing of My Work! is a welcome taunt. The book rewards by refusing to slip into the numbing vortex of academic discourse, taking a fizzy, pop-culture approach to explaining a deep thinker, one who ended up popularized almost in spite of himself.”
In another review of You Know Nothing of My Work! that appeared in TNR.com, American business and technology writer Nicolas Carr says he finds the book “an affectionate, wry portrait that provides a perfect introduction to one of the most influential and misunderstood thinkers of recent times.” He argues that although McLuhan was a scholar of literature, his interpretation of the intellectual and social effects of media was richly allusive and erudite. “Perhaps because of his unusual mind, he had a knack for writing sentences that sounded at once clinical and mystical,” he explains. “(His) kaleidoscopic, almost psychedelic style made him a darling of the counterculture…but it alienated him from his colleagues in academia. To them, McLuhan was a celebrity-seeking charlatan.”
Read David Carr’s “Marshall McLuhan: Media Savant” in The New York Times now!
Read Nicholas Carr’s “The Medium Is McLuhan” in TNR.com now!
ABOUT THE BIOGRAPHER:
Douglas Coupland is a Canadian novelist whose fiction is complemented by recognized works in design and visual art that reflect his early formal training. His first novel, the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularized terms such as “McJob” and “Generation X.” He has published 13 novels, a collection of short stories, seven nonfiction books, and a number of dramatic works and screenplays for film and television. For these he has been described as “possibly the most gifted exegete of North American mass culture writing today.”
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