Six years after the publication of his seminal work, Understanding Media, the Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan linked his insights into media to his love of literature and produced From Cliché to Archetype. In the age of electronic retrieval, the entire phenomenal universe is at once junkyard and museum — cliché and archetype. Every culture now rides on the back of every other culture.
In these pages, readers learn how to look at stale clichés with fresh eyes, as artists do, and discover that clichés provide the key to understanding Modernism, from the puns of James Joyce to Ionesco’s Theater of the Absurd. McLuhan mines the greats of modern literature, such as Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, and points the way to richer understanding of their work.
