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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Modern-day myth-making turned on its head, July 5, 2005
This is McLuhan's first book, originally published in 1951 and has been long out of print. It precedes his second book and cult classic 'The Gutenberg Galaxy', by a decade and a half. This is also quite unique in that it has no relationship with McLuhan's more famous theoretical ramblings.
In this book, McLuhan takes on myth-making in US society by showing how film posters, comic strips, advertisements, magazine covers, newspaper layout and articles etc., try to persuade people into something, and yet a close observation of their inherent contradictions allows you to escape their machinations.
The book celebrates deliberate misreading of commonplace things like advertising to show how the persuasive trap of mass culture/consumer culture can be escaped.
All articles in the book follow the format of article/poster/ad, its analysis and some sharp witty aphoristic observations in a boxed area that serve as liberating repartees against the messages that these products of consumer culture intend to send.
The philosophy of the book is derived from McLuhan's premise (borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe's story 'The Maelstrom') that to escape a maelstrom you need to study things going down and things that resurface and align yourself with things that resurface.
In this respect, it can be considered a jargon-free precursor of latter-day deconstructive literary and cultural criticism. And it is much more liberating and enlightening to a lay reader than jargon ridden discussions or purely vehement denuciations of the power of mass culture which don't help laymen liberate themselves anyway, because of their highly inaccessible prose.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Serious and witty!, June 4, 2007
I am happy that Gingko Press has brought out this handsome 50th anniversary edition of Marshall McLuhan's _The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man_, and I am looking forward to seeing _The Complete Mechanical Bride_ that Gingko Press plans to publish in the near future. I'd like to provide some background information here regarding McLuhan's first book.
It is hard to say exactly when Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) started gathering the materials and writing the short essays that were published as _The Mechanical Bride_ in 1951. However, Walter J. Ong, S.J. (1912-2003), has reported that McLuhan was working on this project when Ong studied under him at Saint Louis University in the late 1930s and early 1940s. During this same period McLuhan was also working on his Cambridge University doctoral dissertation on Thomas Nashe and the verbal arts in his time, which was accepted in 1943 and published by Gingko Press in 2006.
Because rhetoric has long been understood in Western culture as the art of persuasion, we need to take into account that McLuhan was studying the history of rhetoric in detail when he was assembling the artifacts of American popular culture and writing the witty commentaries about them that came to be published in _The Mechanical Bride_. To spell out the obvious, the artifacts aim to persuade us to buy a product and to imagine ourselves as associating with and perhaps even identifying with the imagery employed in each artifact.
But why bother to write witty commentaries about the artifacts? McLuhan was under the influence of the New Criticism he had studied under I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis at Cambridge University. Thus the short essays in _The Mechanical Bride_ can be understood as exercises in practical criticism (to borrow the title of Richards's most widely known book). To be sure, McLuhan is critical of popular culture, but he takes it seriously enough to write intelligently about it. His short essays are witty and amusing.
--Thomas J. Farrell, author of Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication (Media Ecology)
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
McLuhan's Mythologies, April 11, 2007
This, McLuhan's first book, serves as a good introduction to him, since he has not yet begun to formulate his theories about media that would later make him so famous. Consequently, it is easier to read than, say, The Gutenberg Galaxy or Understanding Media. It is also much more fun.
The reader should keep in mind that this is still premature McLuhan, for he had not yet read Harold Innis's 1950 classic--which represents the true birth of media studies--Empire and Communications. This book hit McLuhan like an atomic bomb, for it completely ruptured his thinking regarding media. In The Mechanical Bride, he is still analyzing the content of the media, deciphering what the subliminal messages are saying to us unconsciously; but after reading Innis, he realized that it was not the message that was important (at least not for him) but rather the type of medium through which the message was conveyed, for Innis's discussions of how particular kinds of media affected the nature and structure of ancient empires caused McLuhan to realize that it was actually the medium that was the important thing. Whether a culture used clay or papyrus as its means of communication, Innis asserted, determined much about the fate of that culture.
With that caveat in mind, then, the reader is free to roam through these pages, observing a McLuhan that would never exist in the same way again. He comments, sometimes hilariously, on one advertisement, movie poster or magazine after the next. He has interesting things to say about genres like the Western or the soap opera (for instance, he says that the Western is the masculine equivalent to the soap opera, for its values are the opposite of those of the domestic drama) and we also find here, for the first time, his speculations on Sherlock Holmes, a theme that will recur in many of his later writings.
McLuhan at this point had read and metabolized such key thinkers for him as Lewis Mumford and Siegfried Giedion, and they are referred to often in the body of the text. (There even occurs a reference to Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces; apparently the only book he ever read by Campbell, his Irish intellectual colleague who was more concerned with deciphering the messages than the media themselves). McLuhan, in The Mechanical Bride, is still feeling his way, and he is not yet sure of himself. But it is a delight for the reader to watch this great American thinker--the equivalent, easily, of any of the great French postmodernists (this book bears certain similarities, for instance, to Barthes' Mythologies)--tentatively poking his way about in the middenheap of popular culture, looking for ways in which to organize it into something one can get a grasp on.
I hope that you enjoy this book as much as I did. But do let me know if you don't.
--John David Ebert, author
Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society
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