‘Cambridge was a Shock’: Comparing Media from a Literary Critic’s Point of View – Bernhard J. Dotzler

In 1969 Marshall McLuhan published a collection of his literary essays, Th e Interior Landscape: Th e Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan 1943-1962, including ‘Joyce, Mallarmé, and the Press’. Looking at these essays it is clear that McLuhan’s theory of media, developed in Th e Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964), is essentially in uenced by literary criticism. ‘My study of media began and remains rooted in the work of these men’, McLuhan wrote, referring to Richards, Leavis, Eliot and Pound. In the following, basic concepts of McLuhan’s major books on the history and theory of media shall be examined with reference to McLuhan’s roots in literary studies.