Ex-centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media (Dec 2023)
“The Interval Is Where the Action Is”: Mosaic Readings T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos and Marshall McLuhan’s Counterblast
Abstract
Comparing the Gutenberg Galaxy with what he called the Marconi Constellation (Understanding Media, 1964), Marshall McLuhan discussed “the effects of radio [as being] quite independent of its programming” (that is, “the medium is the message”), noting that electronic media represent “an ever-simultaneous flow which is a very far cry indeed from the one direction, one level flow of the printed page, or of the lecture platform.” Thinking of what he calls “the typographic trance of the West [that] has endured until today” (Playboy interview, 1969), McLuhan prophesized the shift from the visual culture of print to the acoustic culture of the electronic: “[T]he Gutenberg Galaxy is being eclipsed by the constellation of Marconi.” I propose that this concept has its roots in McLuhan’s deep interest in modernism but also that it leaves its imprint on his progressive pedagogy as formulated in “Education in the Electronic Age” (1967, 1970) where he proposes an experiential, collaborative, student-centered, project-based, integrated learning as a way of “the training of [students’] perception.” In this paper, I compare two brief passages, one from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and the other from McLuhan’s Counterblast (1954) as examples of the progressive heuristic tool of exploration McLuhan called “mosaic” and offered as a tool for the training of readers’/students’ perception. Eliot’s poem offers a paradigm of a modernist experiment in which the reader is invited to inhabit the text’s intervals, learning to read the page which, though visual, aspires to be polyphonic, simultaneous, and (in McLuhan’s terms) acoustic--instead of just visual. The paper therefore argues that McLuhan’s emerging, radical, future-looking, electronic, post-modernist poetics is firmly rooted in the modernist praxis of “making it new” that looks both to its modernist past and the electronic/media/digital future.
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