Marshall McLuhan and James Joyce: Beyond Media

McLuhan used the works of James Joyce extensively in his own work. This article deals with the source of many of his most startling observa-tions regarding art, society and technology-James Joyce. Les oeuvres de James Joyce ont forts kt6 utilizees dans les travaux de McLuhan. Cet article ddmontre I'influence de Joyce dam ces obsema-tions les plus brilliantes sur l'art, la sociCt6 et la technologie. "Nobody could pretend serious interest in my work who is not completely familiar with all of the works of James Joyce and the French symbolists. " Marshall McLuhan The irony of all the complex contradictions of Marshall McLuhan's variegated career apparently is that he failed to successfully communicate the insights of contemporary poetry and art to communications researchers. Whatever else McLuhan was up to in his sometimes exasperating and,often enigmatic writings, he developed a theory of communication which he considered to be "applied Joyce, " in the same sense that he had analyzed Joyce as developing an aesthetic