In any event, conventional literary critics such as Kermode contributed to the tsunami of a backlash among conventional academics against McLuhan's books THE GUTENBERG GALAXY (1962) and UNDERSTANDING MEDIA (1964). The academic backlash against McLuhan parallels the anti-60s backlash of conservatives. Birds of a feather flock together.
Nevertheless, after McLuhan's death in 1980, Ong published a ringing tribute to McLuhan for being thought-provoking in an informed way: "McLuhan as Teacher: The Future is a Thing of the Past" in the JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION, volume 31, number 3 (Summer 1981): pages 129-135.
Drawing on McLuhan's thought, Beatrice Bruteau (1930-2014; Ph.D. in philosophy, Fordham University, 1969) distinguishes the paleo-feminine era in the human psyche and the new feminine era. In effect, she sees the paleo-feminine era in the human psyche as manifesting in oral culture 1.0, and the new feminine era in the human psyche in Western culture as manifesting in oral culture 2.0.
However, in my estimate, the new feminine era in the human psyche in Western culture manifested in the Romantic Movement, but it is further manifesting in our contemporary oral culture 2.0 in Western culture.
No doubt the spirit of modernism contributed to the further manifesting of the new era of the feminine in the psyche in Western culture in our contemporary oral culture 2.0.
Bruteau also incorporates McLuhan's thought, in a different way, in her book THE PSYCHIC GRID: HOW WE CREATE THE WORLD WE KNOW (1979).
Your guess is as good as mine as to why Bruteau was able to use McLuhan's thought creatively, when so many stodgy academics reacted to his thought with hostility.
For further reading about Ong and McLuhan, see the 600-page anthology titled AN ONG READER: CHALLENGES FOR FURTHER INQUIRY, edited by me and Paul A. Soukup (2002).
In conclusion, of course many of us in contemporary Western culture today are still processing and digesting the various forms of modernism that Gay discusses, because we can still sense hints of our identities expressed in those various forms of modernism in Western culture.
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