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Understanding McLuhan
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Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso
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09065_Field_TCGG T830.txt
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1996-04-10
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similar sentiment inspires A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the
Books by Dean Swift. But it is to The Dunciad that we must
turn for the epic of the printed word and its benefits to
mankind. For here is the explicit study of plunging of the human
mind into the sludge of an unconscious engendered by the
book. It has been obscured to posterity, in keeping with the
prophecy at the end of Book IV, just why literature should be
charged with stupefying mankind, and mesmerically ushering
the polite world back into primitivism, the Africa within, and
above all, the unconscious. The simple key to this operation is
that which we have had in hand throughout this book—the
increasing separation of the visual faculty from the interplay
with the other senses leads to the rejection from
consciousness of most of our experience, and the consequent
hypertrophy of the unconscious. This ever-enlarging domain
Pope calls the world “of Chaos and old Night.” It is the tribal,