Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08979_Field_TCGG T744.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 936b | 16 lines

themselves.” (p. 164)

     The Spanish concern, then, was with the very medium of
print as effecting a new ratio of the senses, a new mode of
consciousness. As Casalduero puts it in Cervantes across the
Centuries  (p. 63): “Knight and Squire are neither opposites nor
complements to one another. They are of the same nature with
a difference in proportion. The comic spirit arises from the
juxtaposition of these diverse proportions which are translated
plastically.” With regard to the peculiar Spanish stress on the
medium of the printed word, Stephen Gilman in a chapter on
“The Apocryphal ‘Quixote’” in the same book notes (p. 248)
that authorship in Spain was secondary: “The reader is more
important than the writer.” But this is a long way from the idea
of “what the public wants,” for it is the notion of the medium
of the language itself as a public trust rather than of the