The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time [Hardcover]

Marshall McLuhan (Author), W. Terrence Gordon (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2006

In this previously unpublished work, a young Marshall McLuhan, as cultural historian, illuminates the complexities of the classical trivium, provides the first ever close reading of the enigmatic Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe, and implicitly challenges the reader to accept a new blueprint for literary education.
Ideas that would ground McLuhan's media analysis of the 1960s and 70s are here in embryo, as he sets out in scrupulous detail the role of grammar (interpretation), dialectic, and rhetoric in classical learning. Under McLuhan's scholarly microscope, the internal dynamics of the trivium and its purpose are revealed. As is its indispensable role in giving full due to the rich prose of Thomas Nashe.
In ranging over literature from Cicero to the sixteenth century, McLuhan discovers the source and significance of multiple traditions in Nashe s writings. Here, more than half a century after it was written, is a fresh, insightful, and richly coherent framework for studying Nashe and an unequivocal call for a program of education based on the ambitious and lofty ideal of reintegrating the classical trivium.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 276 pages
• Publisher: Adbusters (April 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1584230673
• ISBN-13: 978-1584230670
• Product Dimensions: 10.6 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #296,016 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the essential roots of McLuhan, May 5, 2006

By 

Howard Wetzel (Cleveland Hts., Ohio USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time (Hardcover)

Thank you, Gingko Press. Here finally are the roots of all that followed, the back story of every judgment or cryptic comment McLuhan ever made. Here is the restless, rash scholar as young Turk, inventing for himself a necessary intellectual history to place Thomas Nashe in his proper context- and what McLuhan quickly recognized was that this history bears continually on all cultural transformations. Here is the scholarship the academics said McLuhan lacked; rather he shows where the scholars themselves were lacking, and why he abandoned their methods in favor of Joyce, Eliot, et al, a way of living in and experiencing any present with both understanding and electric immediacy. Some of this appears in a very compressed manner in Eric McLuhan's 'The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake'; it is developed more slowly in this book. Here McLuhan defined the struggle between art and science as between rhetoric and dialectic. Here is Mcluhan the patristic scholar showing that conservative theology does not mean ossified or dialectical; it means having at hand all the rich tools of the tradition with which to renew the present (remember, this is during the time when de Lubac, who tread the same waters, was under censure). Here McLuhan discovered percept in a living Trivium where dialectic was balanced by rhetoric. The war is indeed in the Word. . .

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A "must-read" book, especially for college library shelves and students of classical literature and philosophy, May 5, 2006

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time (Hardcover)

The Classical Trivium: The Place Of Thomas Nashe In The Learning Of His Time is a previously unpublished work of the late Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), presenting the story of western literary culture from antiquity to the Elizabethan age. Examining the divisions of classical Rhetoric, Grammar, and Dialectic, in a strategy that he would later refine in his media analysis of the 1960s and 70s, The Classical Trivium, he connects the roots of ancient philosophy with modern-day interpretive and evaluative techniques. More than a half-century after it was written, The Classical Trivium remains a superb lens through which to examine the traditions of Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe. Divided into four chapters, three devoted to sections of The Trivium and the fourth to Thomas Nashe himself, The Classical Trivium is a "must-read" book, especially for college library shelves and students of classical literature and philosophy.