Literary studies in Canada and throughout the world received a severe shaking-up in the 1960s with the work of Marshall McLuhan. Delighted with the controversy he aroused, for he took it as a sign of awakening consciousness to the ills of his time, McLuhan combined the roles of literary critic, social psychologist, historian of sensibility, and prophet. His own phrase for what he was was media analyst; because of the central importance in human affairs that he assigned to modes of communication, the term is hardly a limiting one. No one, however, was more adamant than McLuhan on the pointlessness of the urge to classify; he abhorred the specialization of the academy, which he saw as the institutionalized expression of a doomed mentality. To the extent that he even yet escapes easy classification, McLuhan's belief in his own uniqueness as a thinker is vindicated.

Herbert Marshall McLuhan was...