McLUHAN, Marshall

Beginning with The Mechanical Bride (1951), McLuhan examined mass-cultural artifacts and then mass culture itself with a critical sensibility honed on the close rhetorical analysis of English literature. This approach generated a wealth of original insights, such as the perception that the representational discontinuity distinguishing modernist painting and literature resembled the newspaper's front page, with its discontinuous field of unrelated articles, oversized headlines, and occasional captioned...