Marshall McLuhan and the Modernist Writers' Legacy

This essay explores in depth the literary ground (and grounding) of Marshall McLuhan’s media theories, revealing en route much that is new about his approach to and insights into media studies. The essay offers a wide-ranging study of McLuhan’s modernist ascendancies, taking in the history of knowledge, rhetoric, and media from the middle ages to the present. The essay demonstrates that it was McLuhan’s literary training in Renaissance literature and rhetoric, and his engagement with Modernist writers, that gave him the conceptual framework and the language with which to analyze contemporary media. Reading these modernists in terms of McLuhan’s ideas works towards a new history of media studies, and provides a new understanding of his creative use of language and style.