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This McLuhan primer traces his evolution from a literary scholar to a pioneer of media studies inquiring endlessly into the relationship between culture and technology. In the 1960s, that relationship was about to change rapidly, ushering in the age dominated by electricity we live in today. Though McLuhan foresaw this, his main concern was not to predict the future but to awaken readers to understanding the effects of new technology on human interaction. Without such understanding, the very survival of literate culture would be at risk. The Woodstock generation found him cool, without necessarily grasping all he said; some scholars of note embraced his teaching, while others unleashed vitriolic criticism ... without necessarily grasping all he said. Everyman's McLuhan respects his own basic principle of always looking at and for the big picture. Did he leave the study of literature behind him when he turned his attention to media? No. How do the two coalesce in the educational program he envisaged? Why did he give as much attention to popular culture as to Elizabethan literature? The answers to such questions and many more emerge in these pages.
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W. Terrence Gordon (M.A., Ph.D., U. of Toronto) is the author/editor of more than 25 published books in semantics, semiotics, history of linguistics. He has written 4 books on Marshall McLuhan and is McLuhan¿s official biographer. He is Professor Emeritus at Dalhousie U. (Halifax, Canada), where he taught translation and linguistics for 30 years.
