Understanding McLuhan
Media insights rooted in the world of a humanist.
It may seem weird, but Marshall McLuhan’s thought about technology was rooted in the trivium—linguistic, political, and philosophical studies formed the trivium, which covered grammar, logic, and rhetoric.
The lower division of the medieval liberal arts, trivium (Latin) means crossroads, was the point where three streets intersect. Just like the Trevi Fountain1 in Rome, which was the point of intersection of three bodies of water.
“Our time is a time for crossing barriers, for erasing old categories—for probing around.” McLuhan’s crossroads came in 1967, more than two decades after his doctoral thesis about the English Renaissance writer Thomas Nashe.
But it wasn’t just the intersection with technological realism, which he absorbed from Harold Innis2 and led to the publication of ‘The Mechanical Bride: Folklore and Industrial Man’ in 1951.3
McLuhan’s intersection was also in the modernism of Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce crossed with the French symbolists of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Laforgue, Mallarmé and Valéry, and his interests in New Criticism and Catholic thought.
Life and early works
Born in Edmonton, Canada in 1911, his father was in real estate and his mother a performed in ‘elocution,’ the now defunct art of public oratory. McLuhan studied at The University of Manitoba where he completed a BA in English literature in 1933, after switching from mechanical engineering, and an MA with a thesis on George Meredith in 1934.
He move to The University of Cambridge for his PhD in 1936, after winning a scholarship. His dissertation was on Elizabethan poetry. In England he was influenced by scholars who studied popular culture of the day, including comic strips and cartoons.
McLuhan began teaching at St Louis University in 1937, the same year that he converted to Catholicism. The significance of this conversion is apparent in the media theorist Arthur Kroker’s assessment that “McLuhan’s mind represents one of the best syntheses yet achieved of the Catholic legacy.”
During his time at St Louis, McLuhan was working on his doctorate on Thomas Nashe, called ‘The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time,’ completed and awarded by the University of Cambridge in 1943.
In 1944, he moved to Windsor, Ontario where he worked at Assumption College before gaining a post at St Michael’s College, The University of Toronto, in 1946. He remained there for the rest of his academic life.