The Virtual Marshall McLuhan [Hardcover]

Donald F. Theall (Author), Edmund Carpenter (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0773521194 | ISBN-13: 978-0773521193 | Publication Date: March 2001

Marshall McLuhan was a satirist and prophetic poet, who explored subjects from the occult and the esoteric to everyday popular culture and the emerging digital revolution. Written in an accessible, engaging manner, "The Virtual Marshall McLuhan" sheds new light on McLuhan's goals and the background to his influential writings. Donald Theall explores and explains the significance of the emergence of McLuhan as an important figure in North America in the development of an understanding of culture, communication, and technology. He reveals important information about McLuhan and his relationships with his earliest collaborator and life-long friend, anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, as well as with Theall himself, McLuhan's first doctoral student. McLuhan emerges as a complex human being at once attractive, witty, egotistic, and exasperating. Theall examines McLuhan's many roles - proponent of a poetic method; pop guru adopted by Tom Wolfe, Woody Allen and others; North American precursor of French theory (Baudrillard, Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze); artist; and shaman. Complex and intellectual, neither uncritical adulation nor demonization, "The Virtual Marshall McLuhan" does justice to a unique figure caught in a struggle between tradition and modernity, between faith and anarchy.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Theall has done something no previous biographical study of McLuhan had adequately accomplished - he has provided us with an intimate and informed look at McLuhan's sources, especially those in literature." Paul Heyer, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University "Theall breaks new ground and provides extensive, fresh material. He offers fascinating insights into McLuhan's overall project through his examination of such issues as his role as a poet manqué who made use of the 'essai concret,' his stance as a Mennippean satirist, his abiding interest in the gnostic and the occult, his use of the tetrad scheme throughout his writings, and his links to French structuralism and cyberculture theory." William J. Buxton, co-editor of Harold Innis in the New Century: Reflections and Refractions

About the Author

Donald F. Theall is professor emeritus and former president of Trent University. He is the author of The Medium Is the Rear View Mirror: Understanding McLuhan.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 305 pages
• Publisher: Mcgill Queens Univ Pr (March 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0773521194
• ISBN-13: 978-0773521193
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,995,920 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #23 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( M ) > McLuhan, Marshall

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Book From A Master's Apprentice, September 5, 2002

By 

John Fraim (Santa Rosa, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Virtual Marshall McLuhan (Hardcover)

Biographies and accounts of the famous possess a certain fascination. Sometimes even flashes of illumination. But most are based on second-hand knowledge of authors attracted to the famous after attainment of fame. This is often too late because fame has a way of creating a type of trickster mythology obscuring its subject.

A rare few biographies are written by those who had close friendships with the famous before the hazy mythology of fame enveloped their subject. Here are the famous before they were "hijacked" and packaged by icon-making PR handlers, before their entrance onto world stages or tabloid pages. Reading these accounts is somewhat like watching scratchy old home movies that peek into the shadowy early years before later lives were illuminated by the bright flashes of the paparazzi cameras. These stories are often the most interesting, the most enlightening, the most instructive, and too, the most paradoxical and ambiguous.

These thoughts come to mind in reading the brilliant and fascinating book The Virtual Marshall McLuhan by Donald Theall professor emeritus, former president of Trent University and author of The Medium Is the Rear View Mirror. In the thick mythological haze which particularly surrounds the McLuhan legend, it is indeed a rare and insightful friendship.

With this in mind, Theall's book is still a funny hybrid genre not easy to place in traditional categories. Andrew Potter, a reporter for the Canadian National Post says it well in his March 24, 2001 review of the book "Rescuing McLuhan." Potter writes Theall's book "is not a biography of McLuhan, nor is it an application or elaboration of his views. It is perhaps best understood as an exercise in retrieval, an attempt to rescue McLuhan from McLuhanism and McLuhanites, from those who would portray him as the patron saint of the new corporate technotopia as well as from those...who would read him as an early voice in the wilderness, warning of civilization's demise."

* * *

In the summer of 1950, Donald Theall arrived at the University of Toronto as a graduate student. The director of Graduate Studies of the English Department attempted to warn Theall against doing a doctoral degree with an avant-garde, unorthodox professor at the University named Marshall McLuhan.

But Theall was not persuaded and decided to stay in Toronto to study under the iconoclastic professor rather than return to Yale. Theall writes "I felt that between the historically oriented University of Toronto Department of English and the avant-garde McLuhan I was obtaining a badly needed awareness of the study of literature in its historical context as well as within a new, broadly interdisciplinary context."

McLuhan embedded his teaching in literary history but also in the history of grammar, logic, rhetoric, and early theories of education. It was a history of inter-relationships between literature, the arts, and the everyday culture. Certainly a rare combination at the time and one that threatened the rather insular perspective of the English Department at the University of Toronto. When he arrived, McLuhan was the only lay member of the English Department, which primarily consisted of a handful of priests and three nuns.

The Marshall McLuhan that Donald Theall and his new bride Joan met in 1950 was a "charming, good looking, witty, fun-loving, highly intelligent devotee to the world of letters and traditional arts." More significant for what has come to be, notes Theall, McLuhan was a technophobe who often despised technology. In 1950 he did not own an automobile or a vacuum cleaner. And he did not type but used pen and ink and stored his notes in small boxes that had originally contained Laura Secord chocolates.

Toronto in the 50s personified McLuhan's technophobia. It was a boring, forgotten city of three-quarters of a million people. Theall calls it an "overgrown village" adding it was a "somewhat idyllic...still semi-colonial, marginally contemporary city...a sedate, stuffy city where on Sundays the major department store drew curtains across its windows, stores did not sell cigarettes, and people could not have wine or other alcoholic beverages with a restaurant meal ... There was no television; the only radio network, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)...was government owned."

Another close friend and collaborator of McLuhan in Toronto of the 50s was Edmund "Ted" Carpenter. In his short enlightening McLuhan memoir "That Not-So-Silent Sea" in the Appendix of Theall's book, Edmund Carpenter remembers Toronto as a "depressing" place, "not a joyous place at all." It had a meanness which was visible everywhere - in its architecture, its food. McLuhan once described it to Carpenter as the "cringing, flunkey spirit of Canadian culture" and "its servant quarter snobbishness." Leopold Infeld, one of Carpenter's friends, suggested it was "perhaps the finest city in which to die, especially on Sunday afternoon when the transition between life and death would be continuous, painless and scarcely noticeable."

* * *

Theall's book is a master memoir of a time and a person that no other McLuhan biographer can come close to. It is not an easy book and those interested in reading a McLuhan for Dummies are advised to steer clear of this book. But this book is the real thing. I wrote a 6,000 word review of the book which was scheduled for publication in a publication that went out of business. I would be happy to send this review to anyone if they simply write me at [e-mail]. Judge for yourself about Donald Theall's book. For myself, it is a masterpiece from the apprentice of the master.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is a Great Book!, September 3, 2002

By 

Mark Stahlman (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Virtual Marshall McLuhan (Hardcover)

Come on now, the title of the earlier review tells it all, except that Donald Theall isn't the one involved in the academic infighting.

It is also factually incorrect, since the entire sweep of McLuhan's work is more than amply covered in Theall's excellent biography.

As McLuhan's first PhD student Theall (along with McLuhan's first "partner" Ted Carpenter) presents a careful and nuanced perspective on the life and influences of McLuhan -- a rarity in a world where McLuhan has been used for everything short of selling pipe tobacco.

Let those who were outside McLuhan's life fight over him, Theall (and Carpenter) are clearly insiders and they give us the sharpest insight yet into the life of this towering intellect.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Rare Look From An Apprentice of The Master, August 29, 2002

By 

Cassie Fraim (Columbus, OH United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Virtual Marshall McLuhan (Hardcover)

Biographies and accounts of the famous possess a certain fascination. Sometimes even flashes of illumination. But most are based on second-hand knowledge of authors attracted to the famous after attainment of fame. This is often too late because fame has a way of creating a type of trickster mythology obscuring its subject.

A rare few biographies are written by those who had close friendships with the famous before the hazy mythology of fame enveloped their subject. Here are the famous before they were "hijacked" and packaged by icon-making PR handlers, before their entrance onto world stages or tabloid pages. Reading these accounts is somewhat like watching scratchy old home movies that peek into the shadowy early years before later lives were illuminated by the bright flashes of the paparazzi cameras. These stories are often the most interesting, the most enlightening, the most instructive, and too, the most paradoxical and ambiguous.

These thoughts come to mind in reading the brilliant and fascinating book The Virtual Marshall McLuhan by Donald Theall professor emeritus, former president of Trent University and author of The Medium Is the Rear View Mirror. In the thick mythological haze which particularly surrounds the McLuhan legend, it is indeed a rare and insightful friendship.

With this in mind, Theall's book is still a funny hybrid genre not easy to place in traditional categories. Andrew Potter, a reporter for the Canadian National Post says it well in his March 24, 2001 review of the book "Rescuing McLuhan." Potter writes Theall's book "is not a biography of McLuhan, nor is it an application or elaboration of his views. It is perhaps best understood as an exercise in retrieval, an attempt to rescue McLuhan from McLuhanism and McLuhanites, from those who would portray him as the patron saint of the new corporate technotopia as well as from those...who would read him as an early voice in the wilderness, warning of civilization's demise."

* * *

In the summer of 1950, Donald Theall arrived at the University of Toronto as a graduate student. The director of Graduate Studies of the English Department attempted to warn Theall against doing a doctoral degree with an avant-garde, unorthodox professor at the University named Marshall McLuhan.

But Theall was not persuaded and decided to stay in Toronto to study under the iconoclastic professor rather than return to Yale. Theall writes "I felt that between the historically oriented University of Toronto Department of English and the avant-garde McLuhan I was obtaining a badly needed awareness of the study of literature in its historical context as well as within a new, broadly interdisciplinary context."

McLuhan embedded his teaching in literary history but also in the history of grammar, logic, rhetoric, and early theories of education. It was a history of inter-relationships between literature, the arts, and the everyday culture. Certainly a rare combination at the time and one that threatened the rather insular perspective of the English Department at the University of Toronto. When he arrived, McLuhan was the only lay member of the English Department, which primarily consisted of a handful of priests and three nuns.

The Marshall McLuhan that Donald Theall and his new bride Joan met in 1950 was a "charming, good looking, witty, fun-loving, highly intelligent devotee to the world of letters and traditional arts." More significant for what has come to be, notes Theall, McLuhan was a technophobe who often despised technology. In 1950 he did not own an automobile or a vacuum cleaner. And he did not type but used pen and ink and stored his notes in small boxes that had originally contained Laura Secord chocolates.

Toronto in the 50s personified McLuhan's technophobia. It was a boring, forgotten city of three-quarters of a million people. Theall calls it an "overgrown village" adding it was a "somewhat idyllic...still semi-colonial, marginally contemporary city...a sedate, stuffy city where on Sundays the major department store drew curtains across its windows, stores did not sell cigarettes, and people could not have wine or other alcoholic beverages with a restaurant meal ... There was no television; the only radio network, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)...was government owned."

Another close friend and collaborator of McLuhan in Toronto of the 50s was Edmund "Ted" Carpenter. In his short enlightening McLuhan memoir "That Not-So-Silent Sea" in the Appendix of Theall's book, Edmund Carpenter remembers Toronto as a "depressing" place, "not a joyous place at all." It had a meanness which was visible everywhere - in its architecture, its food. McLuhan once described it to Carpenter as the "cringing, flunkey spirit of Canadian culture" and "its servant quarter snobbishness." Leopold Infeld, one of Carpenter's friends, suggested it was "perhaps the finest city in which to die, especially on Sunday afternoon when the transition between life and death would be continuous, painless and scarcely noticeable."

* * *

Theall's book is a master memoir of a time and a person that no other McLuhan biographer can come close to. It is not an easy book and those interested in reading a McLuhan for Dummies are advised to steer clear of this book. But this book is the real thing... Judge for yourself about Donald Theall's book. For myself, it is a masterpiece from the apprentice of the master.