Marshall McLuhan

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Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) was a Canadian philosopher.

His work is one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory.

Born in Edmonton, Alberta, McLuhan studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge.

He began his teaching career as a professor of English at several universities in the US and Canada before moving to the University of Toronto in 1946, where he remained for the rest of his life. McLuhan coined the expression "the medium is the message" and the term global village, and predicted the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented.

He was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, though his influence began to wane in the early 1970s.

In the years after his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles.

With the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web, interest was renewed in his work and perspective.

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Life and career

McLuhan was born in Edmonton, Alberta, on July 21, 1911, and was named "Marshall" after his maternal grandmother's surname. Maurice's brother was born two years later. His parents were both born in Canada: Elsie Naomi (née Hall), a Baptist school teacher who later became a filmmaker; and Herbert Ernest McLuhan, a Methodist with a real-estate business in Edmonton, were both born in Canada; and his father, Herbert Ernest McLuhan, was a Methodist. McLuhan's father enlisted in the Canadian Army when the company suffered at the end of World War I. He contracted influenza and stayed in Canada, away from the front lines after a year of service. Following Herbert's discharge from the army in 1915, the McLuhan family moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba, where Marshall grew up and went to school before enrolling in the University of Manitoba in 1928.

He shifted majors and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree (1933), winning a University Gold Medal in Arts and Sciences after one year as an engineer. He went on to earn a Master of Arts degree (1934) in English from the university. He had long wanted to study graduate studies in England and had been accepted to the University of Cambridge, but had failed to secure a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford.

Despite having already obtained his B.A. M.A. and M.A. Before enrolling in doctoral studies, Cambridge required him to enroll as an undergraduate "affiliated" student with one year's credit toward a three-year bachelor's degree. In the fall of 1934, he entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he studied under I. Richards and F. R. Leavis, both of whom were influenced by New Criticism. On reflection, years later, he credited the faculty with influence on his later work's direction because of their emphasis on the "train of perception," as well as other aspects such as Richards' notion of "feedforward." These studies served as a precursor to his later experiments on technological architectures. He obtained the Cambridge bachelor's degree in 1936 and began attending the Cambridge University graduate program.

McLuhan explored his tumultuous relationship with faith and literature in order to "gratify his soul's thirst for truth and beauty" later referred to this period as agnosticism. He took the first steps toward Catholicism in 1937 while reading G. K. Chesterton's biography at Cambridge.

In 1935, he wrote to his mother:

McLuhan completed what seemed to be a slow but complete conversion process when he was accepted officially into the Catholic Church at the end of March 1937. His father accepted the call after consulting a minister. His mother, on the other hand, was inconsolable, fearing that his conversion would jeopardize his career. McLuhan was ordained early in his life, but his faith remained a private matter. He had a lifelong fascination with the number three (e.g., the Trinity) and had often stated that the Virgin Mary gave him intellectual assistance. He worked in Catholic institutions of higher education for the remainder of his life.

Since being unable to find a suitable position in Canada, he returned from England to serve as a teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1936-1937. He taught English at Saint Louis University from 1937 to 1940 (with an interruption from 1939 to 1940 when he returned to Cambridge). He taught Shakespeare, later teaching and befriending Walter J. Ong, who would write his doctoral dissertation on a subject that McLuhan called to his attention, as well as becoming a well-known authority on communication and technology, making him a well-known authority on communications and technology.

Corinne Lewis, a tutor and young actress from Fort Worth, Texas, who married on August 4, 1939, met McLuhan. They lived in Cambridge, where he finished his master's degree (awarded in January 1940) and began working on Thomas Nashe and the verbal arts. Although the McLuhans were in England, World War II had broken out in Europe. For this reason, he was allowed to complete and submit his dissertation from the United States without having to return to Cambridge for an oral defense. The McLuhans returned to Saint Louis University in 1940, where they began a family as he continued teaching. In December 1943, he was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree.

Hugh Kenner would be one of his students at Assumption College in Windsor, Ontario, from 1944 to 1946, and in 1946, he joined the faculty of St. Michael's College, a Catholic college of the University of Toronto. Harold Innis, a Canadian economist and communications scholar, had a major influence on his work. "I am delighted to think of my own book The Gutenberg Galaxy as a footnote to Innis' observations on the psychological and social implications of printing, first of writing and then of printing."

McLuhan founded the University of Toronto's Communication and Culture seminars, which were sponsored by the Ford Foundation in the early 1950s. As his name grew, he received an increasing number of offers from other universities. He made his first major work, The Mechanical Bride (1951), in which he explores the effects of advertisement in society and culture during this period. Edmund Carpenter and his partner produced Explorations, a key academic journal from the 1950s. McLuhan and Carpenter have been described as the Toronto School of communication theory, as well as Harold Innis, Eric A. Havelock, and Northrop Frye. During this period, McLuhan supervised the doctoral thesis of modernist writer Sheila Watson on the subject of Wyndham Lewis. The University of Toronto founded the Centre for Culture and Technology in 1963, in an attempt to discourage him from moving to another university.

McLuhan was named the Albert Schweitzer Chair in Humanities at Fordham University in the Bronx from 1967 to 1968. He was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor while at Fordham and was treated successfully. He returned to Toronto, where he taught at the University of Toronto for the remainder of his life and lived in Wychwood Park, a bucolic enclave overlooking downtown, where Anatol Rapoport was his neighbor.

He was named Companion of the Order of Canada in 1970. The University of Dallas hosted him from April to May, naming him to the McDermott Chair in 1975. Marshall and Corinne McLuhan had six children: Eric, twins Mary and Teresa, Stephanie, Elizabeth, and Michael. The associated expenses of a large family's retirement lured him back to advertising work and increased speaking and speaking engagements for major companies, including IBM and AT&T.

McLuhan appeared in a cameo as himself in Woody Allen's Oscar-winning Annie Hall (1977). As McLuhan appears and silences Allen in a cinema queue, he says, "You know nothing of my work." This was one of McLuhan's most popular statements to and about those who disagreed with him.

McLuhan suffered a stroke in September 1979 that impaired his speech. Woody Allen, the University of Toronto's School of Graduate Studies, tried to close his research center shortly thereafter, but it was blocked by widespread demonstrations, most notably by Woody Allen. McLuhan never fully recovered from the stroke and died in his sleep on December 31, 1980. He is buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Thornhill, Ontario, Canada.

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