McLuhan. Another Literary History

Michał LarekDepartment of Modern Literature and Culture Institute of Polish Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland McLuhan. Another Literary History The author of the present article revisits McLuhan’s important, albeit rarely discussed, 1962 monograph The Gutenberg Galaxy. The Making of Typographic Man, in which the father of contemporary media studies manifests himself as a literary scholar, a historian of culture and a critic of the philosophical tradition of the West. Larek re-traces the scholar’s reflection upon the impact of the civilizational transformation triggered by the invention of print not only in terms of the “literary” consequences of the birth of the idea of mechanical reproduction, but – more importantly – in terms of the change in the self-awareness of the western man. The Gutenberg Galaxy is thus an “antibook” by means of which McLuhan plays with – and challenges – patterns of thinking formed as a result of the birth of the new medium, indicating that Gutenberg’s invention has degraded awareness subjugating it to the discipline of the social machinery, whose directives it automatically carries out. Gutenberg’s man is a creator whose most important text-generating tool is montage; yet, the above notwithstanding, the reader’s interaction with a printed page, which gave birth to new formulas of philosophical doubting, underlies the evolution of contemporary criticism. Thus oriented, McLuhan’s alternative literary history avoids interpretation: pragmatic and technologically inclined, such a history understands a text as a material entity, which impacts humankind in more ways than the hermeneutic tradition of literary scholarship would be ready to admit.Keywords: McLuhan, Gutenberg, criticism, awareness, non-hermeneutic literary historyMichał LarekZakład Literatury i Kultury Nowoczesnej Instytut Filologii PolskiejUniwersytet im. A. Mickiewicza w Poznaniu McLuhan. Another Literary HistoryThe author of the present article revisits McLuhan’s important, albeit rarely discussed, 1962 monograph The Gutenberg Galaxy. The Making of Typographic Man, in which the father of contemporary media studies manifests himself as a literary scholar, a historian of culture and a critic of the philosophical tradition of the West. Larek re-traces the scholar’s reflection upon the impact of the civilizational transformation triggered by the invention of print not only in terms of the “literary” consequences of the birth of the idea of mechanical reproduction, but – more importantly – in terms of the change in the self-awareness of the western man. The Gutenberg Galaxy is thus an “antibook” by means of which McLuhan plays with – and challenges – patterns of thinking formed as a result of the birth of the new medium, indicating that Gutenberg’s invention has degraded awareness subjugating it to the discipline of the social machinery, whose directives it automatically carries out. Gutenberg’s man is a creator whose most important text-generating tool is montage; yet, the above notwithstanding, the reader’s interaction with a printed page, which gave birth to new formulas of philosophical doubting, underlies the evolution of contemporary criticism. Thus oriented, McLuhan’s alternative literary history avoids interpretation: pragmatic and technologically inclined, such a history understands a text as a material entity, which impacts humankind in more ways than the hermeneutic tradition of literary scholarship would be ready to admit. Keywords: McLuhan, Gutenberg, criticism, awareness, non-hermeneutic literary histor