Six years after the publication of his seminal
work, Understanding Media, the Extensions of Man,
Marshall McLuhan linked his insights into media to his
love of literature and produced From Cliché to
Archetype. In the age of electronic retrieval, the
entire phenomenal universe is at once junkyard and
museum -- cliché and archetype. Every culture now rides
on the back of every other culture. In these pages,
readers learn how to look at stale clichés with fresh
eyes, as artists do, and discover that clichés provide
the key to understanding Modernism, from the puns of
James Joyce to Ionesco's Theater of the Absurd. McLuhan
mines the greats of modern literature, such as Yeats,
Eliot, and Pound, and points the way to richer
understanding of their work. Discussion ranges over
conventional topics of literary analysis such as genres,
esthetics, rhetoric, paradox, mimesis, and parody,
though never in conventional fashion, because McLuhan
deliberately stakes his turf in a manner that draws
technology and culture together. As a result, the key
terms cliché and archetype are not confined to language
but are shown to have counterparts in the non-linguistic
world. The present work reprises themes from
 Understanding Media, such as old media becoming
the content of new media, and identifies for the first
time the typical effect of a new technology retrieving
an older form of technology. In this new and redesigned
publication of McLuhan's neglected masterpiece,
editor W. Terrence Gordon provides a richer
reading with concise chapter introductions.
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