SCHOLARLY WORKS

Cambridge University doctoral dissertation on the trivium, 1942
The Mechanical Bride, 1951
Explorations, (1953-1957 journal created and published with Edmund Carpenter)
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964
The Medium is the Massage, 1967

During his years at Saint Louis University (1937-1944), Marshall McLuhan worked simultaneously on two projects: his doctoral dissertation and the manuscript that was later published asThe Mechanical Bride (1951). The final book included only a cross-section of the materials McLuhan had prepared for it.

In a 2002 biography of McLuhan, Phillip Marchand described The Mechanical Bride as an “exercise in cultural criticism … a series of essays on advertisements, laying bare their cultural roots and assumptions.”

Explorations was a journal funded in large part by a Ford Foundation grant and published by McLuhan with anthropologist Edmund “Ted” Carpenter and other collaborators. Explorations had 8 issues, published from 1953-1957.

In Explorations, McLuhan “articulated his perceptions of media as extensions of the human body, and of electronic media, in particular, as extensions of the nervous system, imposing, like poetry, their own assumptions on the psyche of the user” (Marchand, 2002).

 

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