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Life Arts    H4'ed 3/29/14

Can Marshall McLuhan Be Rehabilitated? (BOOK REVIEW)

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From the title of Robert K. Logan's book MCLUHAN MISUNDERSTOOD: SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT (Toronto: Key Publishing House, 2013), we might get the impression that Logan plans to counter the backlash against McLuhan's thought.

 

Logan is a Canadian, as McLuhan (1911-1980) was. Logan holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT. For many years, he taught physics at the University of Toronto, where McLuhan taught English. Logan met McLuhan in the 1970s, and he's been writing enthusiastically, and uncritically, about McLuhan's thought ever since. Logan is Jewish. McLuhan was a convert to Roman Catholicism.

 

First, let me set the record straight here about what Logan does not undertake to do.

 

On the one hand, he does not undertake to set forth certain critiques of McLuhan that might be based on some misunderstanding of his thought. But Logan does not even advert directly to any critiques of McLuhan's thought.

 

On the other hand, of the points of McLuhan's thought that Logan discusses, he does not discuss explicitly how any of those points were allegedly misunderstood by any specific critics of McLuhan's thought.

 

In short, Logan is an uncritical McLuhan enthusiast. He is such an uncritical enthusiast that I cannot find one serious criticism of anything McLuhan ever said in Logan's short book -- no criticisms made by his critics, and no criticisms made by Logan

 

Next, in the spirit of setting the record straight about McLuhan, I would like to discuss a few points about him here.

 

After McLuhan had completed his studies in English at CambridgeUniversity, he taught English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for one year (1936-1937). During the spring semester of that year, he was formally received into the Roman Catholic Church. This shows that his religion was important to McLuhan, because by becoming a Catholic he was sealing his fate in academia -- as a Catholic, he would never become a professor at HarvardUniversity.

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Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book (more...)
 

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