Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08416_Field_TCGG T181.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 1KB | 16 lines

     This is, in respect to time, like having foreshortening
without a fixed point of view or vanishing point. And that,
indeed, was the Greek stage of visual abstraction. Somewhat in
the same way, van Groningen argues, Herodotus having “freed
himself from myth and mythical speculations,” made a gesture
“to use the past as an explanation of the present, or at any
rate, of a later phase in the development.” (p. 26) This
visualizing of chronological sequences is unknown to oral
societies, as it is now irrelevant in the electric age of
information movement. The “narrative line” in a literature is
immediately revealing in the same way as the painterly or
sculptural line. It tells exactly how far the dissociation of the
visual from the other senses has proceeded. Erich Auerbach (14)
confirms in literature all aspects of the Greek development as it
has appeared thus far in the other arts. Thus Homer’s Achilles
and Odysseus are presented in flat vertical planes by “fully