2011 is the centennial of Marshall McLuhan’s birth. McLuhan was the first media critic in academia, a remarkable fact because today’s academia is rife with fashionable media criticism, with entire university departments studying TV, movies, and communications. When McLuhan first started writing about television and communication networks, English professors did not study popular culture, they wrote about Shakespeare and other canonized writers.
The other day we talked about Stanisalw Lem and the lack of literary criticism in SF, and today I‘d like to revisit that a bit. I've been thinking about SF a lot lately. Obviously, I'm a fan, but also I've kind of been goaded in this direction by some literary criticism I've been reading by other SF writers (Basically Lem and Ellison), and I've hit on something that's an interesting paradox in SF, or at least in pulp SF.
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