McLuhan Glosses on media origins of Ulysses

McLuhan the revolutionary man of letters

Gloss shares with other languages the Latin origin of the word Glossa, which means obscure word.

Gloss, means the interpretation of an obscure text, comment, explanation. An annotated text is a glossed text.

The Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford, is a set of glosses. It's a glossary.

In the case of McLuhan, his glosses are more extensive with many references, quotes, data, offering practical ways of showing causal operations throughout history. Each piece of The Gutenberg Galaxy mosaic , is a gloss.

McLuhan developed a whole set of rational concepts for analyzing Media. He exposed them in several books, in a difficult and unattractive style for reading. For an educated opinion, the Playboy interview is enough, and contains all you need to know about Media.

We will use these McLuhan concepts in McLuhan to "gloss" Ulysses. We will do it for Homer and Joyce's Ulysses.

The choice comes from the fact that Homer's Odyssey, the adventures and misadventures of Ulysses, or Odysseus for the Greeks, is one of the major epic poems of ancient Greece, and partly a result of the Iliad, which is the oldest work of Western literature.

James Joyce was inspired to build his epic under Homer, and wrote his Ulysses, which is one of the most important novels of modern literature and will be our case study to demonstrate that Marshall McLuhan is one of the greatest literary minds there is.

It is a strong statement. For those who want to dismiss it, McLuhan himself said, and I quote, in Understanding Media: Extensions of man: (page 19)

It is, however, no time to suggest strategies when the threat has not even been acknowledged to exist. I am in the position of Louis Pasteur telling doctors that their greatest enemy was quite invisible, and quite unrecognized by them. Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the "content" of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as "content." The content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera. The effect of the movie form is not related to its program content. The "content" of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech.

If literature is not the media, McLuhan has nothing to say ... If it is, McLuhan deserves to be recognized, because his perceptions completely revolutionize the understanding and production of literature. And James Joyce somehow knew all this, but never organized and cataloged and explained the way McLuhan did, and it will appear here, examining Joyce under McLuhan. Which is exactly the opposite of what nowadays is settled down, i.e., McLuhan would be an application of Joyce, when in fact, Joyce is an application of McLuhan...

Conventionally, the Canadian literature scholar and communications theorist Herbert Marshall McLuhan (born July 21, 1911 in Edmonton / Canada, died December 12, 1980 in Toronto) specialized in how society is changed by the mass media. McLuhan achieved fame with his book, entitled "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man", which was published in 1964. The German translation appeared in 1968. The first chapter of his book starts with the much-quoted line, "The medium is the message". In his book, McLuhan expounded the theory that modern electronic media would ultimately turn human awareness and knowledge into an entity shared by all of society, just as electrotechnology has turned the human nervous system into a global network.In 1962, McLuhan brought out his book entitled "The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man". In this book, he discussed the sociological and social changes triggered by the invention of movable type by Johannes Gutenberg. Letterpress, says McLuhan, was the first invention to put visual communication before the spoken word, strengthened the then growing trend towards homogeneity and reproducibility and ultimately made the national states as we now know them possible.McLuhan taught at various universities throughout Canada and the USA, and received many academic and non-academic accolades over his career. He also coined the term "the global village", which refers to the way the entire global community can be brought together by means of electronic communication.

The electro electronic amplifications are called by McLuhan "electricity" and how they act in the direction indicated by McLuhan can be understood through a scheme he calls "Tetrad" and throughout this paper we will make an exercise of it with the largest possible number of devices, equipment, electro electronic devices. For now, a device that is not really tangible, but that is the main artifact that we will use in our work, deserves an early explanation so we can better understand what is behind the operation of this project. This device is the Internet and can be understood in <

We're inside of it at this very moment, and we will navigate the following way<