Blackwell Reference Online

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Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada in 1911. He spent his formative years up to his undergraduate and master's level studies in English literature at the University of Manitoba (1929–34) in the prairie city of Winnipeg. McLuhan earned his doctorate in English literature from Cambridge in 1942, writing a dissertation on Thomas Nashe. He taught briefly at the University of Wisconsin (1936–7) and for a longer stint at the University of St. Louis (1937–44) before returning to Canada to teach at Assumption College in Windsor, Ontario (1944–6). He joined St. Michael's College in the University of Toronto in 1946 and spent his entire career there, with the exception of one year as the Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities at Fordham University in New York (1967–8). He died at home in Toronto on New Year's Eve, 1980. McLuhan's first book, The Mechanical Bride (1951) , is his most sociological. It appeared during a decade rich in international examples of cultural studies, including, in France, Roland Barthes's Mythologies (1957); in the UK, Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957); and in the US, Reuel Denny's The Astonished Muse (1957). All of these books critically analyze the consequences of the emergence of a massified popular culture. Eventually, McLuhan turned his back on the critical insights of his first book into how media aid political mythology, ... log in or subscribe to read full text