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Bob Dobbs <[log in to unmask]>
Tue, 1 Oct 2013 23:56:11 -1000
text/plain (45 lines)
Since McLuhan's project was "the road to Finnegans Wake" (original subtitle of THE GUTENBERG GALAXY), were you confident in approaching FW after attending his seminar?

Did the media idea help you to read and understand/appreciate THE CANTOS?

I hope you will forgive these questions, Steve.

I don't often get the chance to query former students of MM.




On Oct 1, 2013, at 6:11 PM, Stephen J Adams wrote:

> Bob--
> 
> Yes, he was often obscure, sometimes wildly wrong (facts be damned), always brilliant. I understood "medium is message" and transference to media of the New Critical "language not paraphrasable content" thinking that I had been indoctrinated into. McLuhan was a New Critic before he was a media theorist.
> 
> SA
> 
> On 10/01/13, Bob Dobbs  <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> Stephen,
>> 
>> The myth is that nobody understood McLuhan in the 60s and by the 90s he was more than obvious, even obsolete.
>> 
>> How did you fare with his ideas as a student in '67-68?
>> 
>> Was the "radio analogy" very helpful in grasping Pound?
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Oct 1, 2013, at 4:39 AM, Stephen J Adams wrote:
>> 
>>> Bob--
>>> 
>>> I too was in McLuhan's grad class at Toronto, 1967-68. His talk -- or maybe his oracles -- frequently dealt with relationships among literature, radio, TV and other media. Incidentally, the radio analogy was made earlier in an academic article on "The Waste Land" by Delmore Schwartz in 1945. ("T.S. Eliot as International Hero").
>> 
>> 
> --
> Stephen J. Adams
> Department of English
> University of Western Ontario
> "Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love." 
> – Reinhold Niebuhr

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