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1

Platons Phaidros-Passage und McLuhans Medientheorie

100%

Giessen H. W.

Germanica Wratislaviensia

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2013

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vol. 138

153 - 161

EN

This article tries to deliver an interpretation of Platon’s Phaidros text passage in regard of McLuhan’s distinction between ‘cool’ and ‘hot’ media, thus contributing to render more precisely Platon’s theoretical analysis and to explain why Platon’s assumption is regularily quoted but nevertheless had largely no results and effects.

2

McLuhan. Inna historia literatury

89%

Larek M.

ER(R)GO: Teoria – Literatura – Kultura

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2017

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issue 34

EN

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 history

PL

Michał 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 history

3

Bemusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Social Media

75%

Merrin W.

Studia Humanistyczne AGH

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2022

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vol. 21

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issue 2

17-29

EN

In 1985, Neil Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death, a McLuhan-inspired critique of the transformation of public discourse from 19th-century print culture, with its depth of reading, thought and debate, to the contemporary era of television ‘show business’. Developments since then, most notably the digital revolution, allow us to update Postman’s thesis, to explore the digital age that succeeds the electric broadcast era and its contemporary transformation of culture and politics. This paper argues that digital personalisation has exploded the mass-media world, bursting its mainstream bubble into a foam of individual life-worlds, empowering everyone as the producer of their own realities. Arguing that the key thinker of this era is Philip K. Dick (with his exploration of fictive, split, and personal realities), the paper explores the cultural impact of this new post-truth era of ‘media’ realities and the ‘bemusement’ it produces.

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1 ER(R)GO: Teoria – Literatura – Kultura

1 Germanica Wratislaviensia

1 Studia Humanistyczne AGH

1 Giessen H. W.

1 Larek M.

1 Merrin W.

1 2022

1 2017

1 2013

Platons Phaidros-Passage und McLuhans Medientheorie

McLuhan. Inna historia literatury

Bemusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Social Media