From cliche to archetype
Marshall McLuhan (Author), Wilfred Watson (Author)
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. -- From goodreads.com
213 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780670330935, 0670330930
101588
Absurd, Theater of the
Anesthesia
Archetype
Author as cliché (book as probe)
Casuistry (art as lie)
Centennial metaphor
Cliché/archetype as systole-diastole
Cliché as breakdown
Cliché as probe
Consciousness
Doubt
Emotion=sentiment
Environment (as cliché)
Eye, ear
Genres
Hendiadys : cliché as double probe
Identity : the culture hero
Introduction
Jokes
Matching sense
Mimesis, or making sense
The one and the mini
Paradox
Parody
Public as cliché
Rag-and-bone shop
Retrieval
Table of contents
Theater