1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910811092303321

Autore

Willmott Glenn <1963->

Titolo

McLuhan, or modernism in reverse / / Glenn Willmott

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Toronto, [Ontario] ; ; Buffalo, [New York] ; ; London, [England] : , : University of Toronto Press, , 1996

©1996

ISBN

1-282-00823-4

9786612008238

1-4426-7714-7

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (279 p.)

Collana

Theory / Culture

Disciplina

302.23/01

Soggetti

Mass media - Philosophy

Mass media criticism

Modernism (Aesthetics)

Postmodernism

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction: McLuhan's Medium -- 1. The Art of Criticism -- 2. The Art of Montage -- 3. Symbolic Reversals -- 4. The Art of Politics -- 5. Technological Reversals -- 6. The Modern Primitive -- 7. The Postmodern Mask -- 8. The Postmodern Medium -- 9. Being There -- Conclusion: McLuhan's Message.

Sommario/riassunto

He re-evaluates McLuhan as a thinker and writer who moved along the borders of academic and popular culture, and locates him as an integral presence in the history of modern critical thought. The book is divided into two parts, representing modern and postmodern periods. Willmott examines McLuhan's relationship to critical and aesthetic modernism, and political and historical sense of modernity in North America, from the early 1930s to the 1950s. This relationship led McLuhan to articulate and practise what Willmott calls a 'modernism in reverse.' Willmott examines the postmodern practice of this critical aesthetic, from the 1950s to the 1970s, which entailed McLuhan's self-



commodification in art, business, and popular culture.

Our lives are increasingly dominated by new forms of image, sound, data, and language media. Marshall McLuhan called this new order of things the Global Village, and he strove to be true to it as the media-popular 'McLuhan.' Having little use for traditional critical forms or values, and courting instead the discourses of popular culture and big business, McLuhan displayed the authentic, ambivalent place of critical self-reflection in our media-centred world. McLuhan, according to Willmott, must be understood as a vital link in a generation of modern and postmodern critics, one who extracted modernist forms and values from the deconstructions of postmodern culture, and one who forced into public view the emergence of the critical intellectual as 'being-in-media.' Willmott's book fills the need for a first critical, historical, and theoretical re-reading of McLuhan's literary and cultural projects.