Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08845_Field_TCGG T610.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 878b | 16 lines

the oral training involved in writing and reading constituted
much more of a cultural unity for the book than Curtius
suspects. Printing, Curtius sees, split apart the roles of
producer and consumer. But it also created the means and the
motive for applied  knowledge. The means creates the want.

     It was this homiletic use of the book of nature, the mirror
of St. Paul in which we now see in aenigmatate , that enthroned
Pliny as a resource of grammatical exegesis from St. Augustine
forward. Summing up, Curtius finds (p. 321) “that the concept
of the world or nature as a “book” originated in pulpit
eloquence, was then adopted by medieval mystico-philosophical
speculation, and finally passed into common usage.”

     Curtius then turns (p. 322) to Renaissance writers like
Montaigne, Descartes, Thomas Browne, who took over the book