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Gutenberg Galaxy (ENGL 333)
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Gutenberg Galaxy (ENGL 333)
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Lecture 14: The Gutenberg Galaxy - The Making of Typographic Man (1962)February 13th, 2023
Preface
We don’t see in three dimensions – we see in one dimension.
● We can learn to see depth perception.
Point of departure in Parry’s and Lord’s studies of epic (oral) poetry.
● McLuhan argues that, just as Elizabethans were moving from an oral culture into a
literate culture, we are doing the reverse, shifting from a literate culture into a culture of
“secondary orality”
○ “We are today as far into the electric age as the Elizabethans had advanced into
the typographical and mechanical age”
○ “We are experiencing the same confusions and indecisions which they had felt
when living simultaneously two contrasted forms of society and experience”
No individuality in an oral culture (only works as a community).
● Typography gives us individualism.
● Gutenberg (press) produces a galaxy (our typographic world)
A Divided World
“The Elizabethan experience[d] living in a divided world that was dissolving and resolving”
● “Whereas the Elizabethans were poised between medieval corporate existence and
modern individualism, we reverse their pattern by confronting an electronic technology
which would seem to render individualism obsolete and the corporate interdependence
mandatory” (1)
Technologies Affect our Senses
“Man the tool-making animal, whether in speech or in writing or in radio, has long been engaged
in extending one or another of his sense organs in such a manner as to disturb all of his other
senses and faculties”
● Technologies affect sense ratios: the “auditory function” can be “suppressed by literacy,”
and the “visual function of language” can be “given extraordinary extension and power
by literacy” (3)
Tribalism → Literacy
“the member of the tribe … experiences the tribal community as a child experiences his family
and his home, in which he plays his definite part”
● The breakdown of the closed society, raising as it does the problem of class and other
problems of social status, must have had the same effect upon the citizens as a serious
family quarrel and the breaking up of the family home is liable to have on children.
● They were frightened by the breakdown of their ‘natural’ world.
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