Events involving Marshall McLuhan's work.

So great is the recent and current surge of interest in Marshall McLuhan and his work that it has been reported as a phenomenon in several press articles. Renewed interest in academic circles: the McLuhan Programme at the University of Toronto presents courses featuring his work; numerous colleges and universities in Canada and the US offer other courses in McLuhan's work

Interest from new quarters: not only has the old crowd rediscovered McLuhan's thought and approaches, but there is a vital, fresh crowd who find his method of attack fruitful and exciting: these people are largely to be found in the on-line world and in computerdom: a recent casual "WWW survey" found nearly two thousand sites and references to Marshall McLuhan (the number grows daily)

In his last book, Laws of Media: the New Science, McLuhan brought together his two interests, literature and media study. It came as something of a surprise to his readers, . . . because those who knew his literary studies were largely uninterested in his media work, and those who followed his work on culture and technology were nearly all unaware of his literary studies. Yet for McLuhan the two were always inseparable and each contributed to the other. Accordingly, the first issue of this journal began with a (previously unpublished) essay on Francis Bacon and his relation to the tradition of interpretation of the Book of Nature. Marshall McLuhan was fully aware that all of his own work, in literature as much as in culture and media, belonged precisely to that same tradition.

Users of the internet will be familiar with the many references to McLuhan that appear daily. We have tried to select a few of the more useful of these to refer our readers to:

The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time
The Herbert Marshall McLuhan Foundation
The McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto
Wired magazine
Essential McLuhan : Table of Contents
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man : Table of Contents
Understanding McLuhan -- CD-ROM
Marshall McLuhan Studies Room
The Medium and the Light : Table of Contents

Beginning in the fall of 1994, a group of senior academics at one of the world's most prestigious universities, the University of Bologna, planned to undertake a full-scale study of Marshall McLuhan's Cambridge doctoral dissertation, "The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of his Time." The study could not be more timely, given the current spate of interest in McLuhan and his thought. Eric McLuhan, for one, has long maintained that the thesis holds the key to understanding how his father's later work in both literature and communication forms a consistent and coherent whole and does not, as many would have it, represent two radically divergent interests.

This foundation supervises the electronic rights to all of McLuhan's work and is the only agency with authority to grant permission for electronic use of the work and writings and recordings.

URL: http://www.mcluhan.ca/ . Email: info@mcluhan.ca

This program was founded to keep the McLuhan name alive at the University and offers courses of study that include special reference to McLuhan's work.

URL: http://www.mcluhan.utoronto.ca/

This herald of the cyberspace generation and up-to-the-minute monthly newsmag for computer users across North America, and a dramatic success story in the magazine trade, has featured Marshall McLuhan on its masthead from the first issue on. There, he is nominated as the official "patron saint" of their enterprise. As a consequence, Wired has been getting considerable fan mail addressed to McLuhan from readers unaware that he died over fifteen years ago. Of late, the masthead has also featured a small picture of McLuhan and a brief quote from his published work.

URL for Wired Home Page :http://www.wired.com/home/

This new collection of McLuhan's work appeared in late 1995, Essential McLuhan (407 pages: Concord, Ontario: House of Anansi Press), edited by Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone of York University. It presents key documents drawn from every aspect of McLuhan's work: articles, essays, extracts from books, interviews, correspondence, speeches. Both his academic interests and his popular writing on media are represented.

The editors note that the book was made necessary by the increasing demand for McLuhan's work and the fact that most of it is out of print or otherwise inaccessible or unavailable.

For more information see Table of Contents

[Books in print are: Understanding Media (M. I. T. Press), The Gutenberg Galaxy, Laws of Media (both from University of Toronto Press), War and Peace in the Global Village, and The Medium is the Massage (both from Simon and Schuster).]

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

In 1994, on the thirtieth anniversary of its first publication, MIT Press issued a facsimile edition of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

For more information see Table of Contents

A CD-ROM on the ideas and life of "media guru Marshall McLuhan" was published in the Spring of 1996. It is called Understanding McLuhan " in the electric world, change is the only stable factor". The contents include lots of mini-"movies" and "audio clips" of McLuhan and others, the full text of two books, Understanding Media and The Gutenberg Galaxy, among other things.

ISBN: 1-55940-686-0 (formerly 0-9693221-8-6). Suitable for Windows or MAC.
To order: CALL 1-800-565-5758, or FAX 1-800-463-5885

On March 2, 1995, University of Toronto president Robert S. Pritchard officially opened the Marshall McLuhan Studies Room at the Faculty of Information Studies there. Designed as a resource for McLuhan scholars, the room is intended to bring together the published writings of McLuhan as well as works about him and commentary on his thought and writings. A prototype of the CD-ROM being produced by Southam Interactive was unveiled and demonstrated at the opening. Other resources will include video, photographs, and personal memorabilia as well as standard print resources. The Room will also provide access to McLuhan scholars around the world.

The Marshall McLuhan Studies Room is the second venture in McLuhan's name to follow the 1994 amalgamation of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology (at the University of Toronto) with the Faculty of Information Studies. In January, 1995, the faculty and the McLuhan Program introduced the McLuhan Videoconferencing Centre with a twelve-week course on culture and technology, linking students with counterparts at the Université d'Orléans in France.

About to appear, from Stoddart (Canada), The Medium and the Light: a collection of the writings of Marshall McLuhan on the subject of religion. Edited by Eric McLuhan and Fr. Jacek Szklarek. Introduction by Eric McLuhan.

For more information see Table of Contents