Interfaces.indd The North American Intellectual Tradition Camille Paglia1 Recebido 07, jun. 2012 / Aprovado 17, jun. 2012 Resumo: O artigo foi originalmente apresentado em conferência na Fordham University, em 2000, tendo sido publicado dois anos mais tarde no volume de estreia do Journal of the Media Ecology Association, tendo, contudo, permanecido inédito na versão on-line. Contra- pondo-se à penetração do pós-estruturalismo francês nas universidades norte-americanas, o artigo propõe a existência de uma tradição intelectual norte-americana específica, focando- se em três autores-chave para os estudos culturais: Marshall McLuhan, Norman Brown e Leslie Fiedler. Defende-se, assim, um retorno às tradições intelectuais norte-americanas consolidadas nos anos 1950/60. Os três autores analisados são considerados mais úteis para as análises dos grandes fenômenos contemporâneos da mídia de massas e da Internet do que expoentes do pós-estruturalismo, condicionados a uma visão claustrofóbica da sociedade, cega às vastidões da natureza. A desconstrução pode ser necessária para a Europa, com sua longa tradição cultural e suas hierarquias sufocantes, mas não o é nas Américas. Palavras-chave: Marshall McLuhan; Norman Brown; Leslie Fiedler Abstract: This article was originally presented as a lecture at Fordham University in New York in 2000 and was published two years later in the first volume of the Journal of the Media Ecology Association. It has never been published before in an online version. Op- posing the penetration of French post-structuralism in American universities, the paper proposes that there is a distinct and unique American intellectual tradition, focusing on three important authors from cultural studies: Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler and Nor- man Brown. It is argued that there should be a return to American intellectual traditions as consolidated in the years 1950/60. The three authors are considered far more useful for the analysis of the major phenomena of the contemporary mass media and the Internet than are the exponents of post-structuralism, which has a claustrophobic vision of socie- ty, blind to the vastness of nature outside society. Deconstruction may be necessary in Europe, with its long cultural history and suffocating hierarchies, but not in the Americas. Keywords: Marshall McLuhan; Leslie Fiedler; Norman Brown 202 Résumé: Présenté d’abord sous la forme d’une conférence réalisée à la Fordham Uni- versity, en 2000, qui a été publiée deux ans plus tard dans le premier volume du Journal of the Media Ecology Association, ce texte est resté inédit jusqu’à aujourd’hui dans sa version en ligne. En s’opposant à la pénétration du post-structuralisme français dans les universités nord-américaines, le texte propose l’existence d’une tradition intellectuelle nord-américaine spécifique et privilégie trois auteurs représentatifs des études culturel- les: Marshall McLuhan, Norman Brown et Leslie Fiedler. Il s’agit de défendre un retour aux traditions intellectuelles nord-américaines consolidées au cours des années 1950/60. Plutôt que d’être envisagés comme des noms remarquables du post-structuralisme, con- ditionnés à une vision claustrophobique de la société, aveugle à la vastitude de la nature, les trois auteurs choisis sont considérés utiles pour l’analyse des grands phénomènes contemporains des medias et d’Internet. La déconstruction peut être nécessaire à l’Europe qui a une longue tradition culturelle et des hiérarchies suffocantes, mais elle ne l’est pas dans les Amériques. Mots-clés: Marshall McLuhan; Leslie Fiedler; Norman Brown A war still rages over the legacy of the 1960s. For many conservatives that decade, which began in the 1950s spirit and whose cycle of excess was triggered by the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, is responsible for the worst aspects of contemporary culture, from sexual promiscuity and epidemic divorce to rampant drug use and debased educational standards. The immense variety of 1960s experience has been abbreviated into seve- ral stock formulas: leftist political activism, emerging from the civil rights mo- vement and sparking the women’s and the gay liberation movements; the nature- worshipping counterculture of drug-taking hippies, influenced by Asian religions which have thinned out into today’s New Age sensibility; and finally what might be called urban mod, the kaleidoscope of Pop Art, multimedia innovations in dance and film, and a technicolor explosion of theatrical fashion, originating in London’s Carnaby Street and Portobello Road. It’s this last category that I iden- tify with as a disciple of Andy Warhol and his gender-bending circle of poets, musicans, and filmmakers. What seems to have been forgotten is that there were major intellectual breakthroughs in the 1960s, thanks to North American writers of an older gene- Camille Paglia 203 ration. A schism or rupture in continuity occurred, since the young people most influenced by those breakthroughs did not on the whole enter the professional system and their insights were dissipated into the general society. A cultural va- cuum was created that would be filled in the 1970s by French poststructuralism and German critical theory of the Frankfurt School. Those approaches would do- minate American literature departments for the next quarter century, devastating the humanities and reducing their prestige and power in the world at large. It’s time for a recovery and systematic reassessment of the North Ameri- can thinkers whose work, I believe, will endure over time when the French and German schools have been discarded. Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman O. Brown are the triad I would substitute for the big three of French theory – Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault – whose work in my view is specific to postwar European culture and whose ideas do not, I main- tain, transfer successfully into the Anglo-American tradition. McLuhan, Fiedler, and Brown were steeped in literature, classical to mo- dern. They understood the way the creative imagination works, and they exten- ded those insights into speculation about history and society. They themselves creatively reshaped traditions and cross-fertilized disciplines, juxtaposing the old and new to make unexpected connections that remain fresh. Most importan- tly, their influence on others was positive and fruitful. McLuhan, Fiedler, and Brown did not impose their system on acolytes but liberated a whole generation of students to think freely and to discover their own voices. Their independence fostered independence in others. Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, in contrast, hang so heavily on their admirers that only strong, already formed figures like the cultivated scholar Edward Said can use them without being strangled by them. French poststructuralism, like the Frankfurt School whose antiquated pre-World War Two assumptions dictate so much current media study, grinds up texts and subjects and makes them all sound drearily alike. And at this point, as we survey the scholarship of the last three decades, it should be tragically obvious that very few, if any, genuinely major books were produced by the British and American critics who fell under the spell of European theory. I feel fortunate indeed that Marshall McLuhan published his central work, Understanding Media, in the very year – 1964 – that I entered college at the State University of New York at Binghamton. McLuhan’s ideas were to pervade the The North American Intellectual Tradition 204 cultural atmosphere. Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, as well as Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (which McLuhan cites in his bibliography) had appeared just five years before. This was a time when “theory” meant Anatomy of Criticism, the magis- terial work published in 1957 by McLuhan’s rival at the University of Toronto, Northrop Frye. In chapters subtitled “Theory of Modes”, “Theory of Symbols”, “Theory of Myths”, and “Theory of Genres”, Frye demonstrated what vital the- ory should look like – hypotheses and conclusions based on hard evidence, on a wealth of scholarly detail presented in a lucid, accessible style. I will not include Frye here because, as a literary critic rather than an intellectual per se, he rarely addressed contemporary social or political issues outside of education – and he also disliked and rejected mass media. McLuhan’s pioneering examination of the ongoing revolution wrought by electronic media in Gutenberg’s print culture demonstrated how history could be reinterpreted with terms bridging high and popular culture. There was a bre- athtaking sweep to his vision and a charming aptitude for the startling example. McLuhan’s irreverent, aphoristic wit was perfectly attuned to the brash spirit of my generation, with its absurdist “happenings” and its taste for zinging one-liners – in both the acerbic satiric style of comedian Lenny Bruce and the gnomic, ora- cular manner of Zen sages and Hindu gurus. Understanding Media, which had a tremendous impact on me at a pivotal moment in my development, is a landmark of cultural analysis. In its invigorating interplay of high art and popular culture, technology, and commerce, we see an epic panorama of Western culture. Greek myth, Shakespeare, William Blake, James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, and Margaret Mead mingle with the Marx Brothers amid an Alice in Wonderland swirl of clocks, comic books, alphabets, telepho- nes, and typewriters. Architecture, Roman roads, automobiles, sports, dance, jazz, movies, radio, TV, paper currency, clothing--all the elements of culture meet, merge, and bounce away again. In its picaresque form and carnivalesque tone, Understanding Media resembles a work like Petronius Arbiter’s Satyricon, which gives a vivid picture of 1st century Neronian Rome in mutifarious language, from elite banter to working-class slang. McLuhan achieves here what semioticians only claim to do. He finds the interpretive key to our supercharged and overlo- Camille Paglia 205 aded cultural environment, and his swift rhythms, playful tone, and deft touch make academic semiotics look ponderous, pretentious, and pointlessly abstract. In The Mechanical Bride: Folk Lore of Industrial Man, published in 1951, McLuhan brought his training as a literary critic to bear on the iconography of modern advertisements, reproduced in a graphic style that seems amazingly con- temporary. The rest of the world has finally caught up to that book. But McLuhan never displays the condescending irony of postmodernist appropriation, with its fatiguingly arch self-consciousness. Like Andy Warhol, who began his career as a commercial illustrator, I have loved advertisements since childhood, when they conflated in my mind with the Catholic iconography of stained-glass win- dows and the mythological tableaux of paintings and sculptures in picture books. In 1960, I surprised my ninth-grade teacher with a term project consisting of clipped-out ads and running commentary – exactly the style, little did I know, of McLuhan’s Mechanical Bride. Hence my grateful appreciation of that book when I finally saw it – with its merry profusion of Betty Grable posters, pulp-fiction dust jackets, and magazine ads for light bulbs, diamonds, whiskey, mouthwash, girdles, soap flakes, cars, Coca Cola, and cod liver oil. Leslie Fiedler used his profound knowledge of literature to become the fo- refather of today’s academic multiculturalism. He presciently dwelled on the out- sider – the Native American, the black, the homosexual, and even the maturely sexual woman, whom 19th century American literature caricatured or excluded. Fiedler knew how to apply his liberal progressive ideals without deforming the texts under study. He did not indict literature, whatever its ethically disturbing content, nor did he define art as an oppressive tool of unjust power in the re- ductive way now so familiar. Fiedler’s opening of the literary canon to science fiction or to sentimental nineteenth – and twentieth-century novels, like Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, raised hackles in the academic establishment. I was a graduate student at Yale University in 1970 when Fiedler came to speak on the topic, “Teaching Literature in the ‘70s.” Not a single member of the English department came to hear him. But I admired Fiedler’s combination of Jungian archetypes with dark Freudian insights into personality, and I would borrow from it for my own work. Norman O. Brown, with his background in classical studies, moved out of his field to daringly apply Freudian principles to a massive re-reading of Western The North American Intellectual Tradition 206 history. Life Against Death is one of the great non-fiction works of the twentieth century. It is what Michel Foucault longed to achieve but never did. The long, sinuous lines of argumentation--paragraph by paragraph and chapter by chapter-- make Life Against Death a tour de force of North American thought. Brown wea- ves material from Greek philosophy and Christian theology with modern psycho- logy and economic theory to show the conflicts and repressions in human life. He stunningly juxtaposes Jonathan Swift’s so-called “excremental vision” with Martin Luther’s devil-haunted Protestantism and the birth of modern capitalism. Brown shows the link between ideas and physiology, projection and body-ima- ge. Compared to Life Against Death, Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955), one of the centerpieces of the Frankfurt School, seemed overschematic yet blobby and imprecise to me in college, and I continue to question the inflated reputation of Marcuse as well as his Frankfurt colleague, Theodor Adorno. My argument is that the North American intellectuals, typified by McLuhan, Fiedler, and Brown, achieved a new fusion of ideas – a sensory pragmatism or engagement with concrete experience, rooted in the body, and at the same time a visionary celebration of what might be called artistic meta-space – that is, the fictive realm of art, fantasy, and belief portrayed by William Blake in his halluci- natory epic poems that oddly prefigure our own cyberspace. North American philosophers from the late nineteenth century on turned away from the metaphysical preoccupations and increasingly dour world-view of European thinkers. The term “pragmatism” was first used by Charles Peirce in 1878 but was developed by William James, who significantly began his career as a lecturer in anatomy and physiology and only later entered psychology and philosophy. In other words, James’s foundation as a thinker was in the human body. In James’s later portrait of consciousness as an active agent and in his method of testing an idea by defining its “sensations” and asking about its “reac- tions” or practical effects, we see anticipated Marshall McLuhan’s identification of modern media as “extensions” of the human senses and, second, McLuhan’s practice of analyzing technology by focusing on its “effects” in the individual or group. In Understanding Media, for example, McLuhan says, “Environments are not passive wrappings but active processes”. John Dewey, whose critique of authority has had immense influence on modern education, also never lost sight of the biological element in human beha- Camille Paglia 207 vior. Dewey’s theories are grounded in the senses through consideration of “mo- tor-activity” or physical energy. In his philosophy of “instrumentalism”, related to pragmatism, change is a constant in life, but our response should not be doubt or despair, the radical subjectivity of European thought. Dewey is committed to social improvement and experiment, active strategies always subject to review and revision. This resembles McLuhan’s view of the whirlwind of modern socie- ty, where each invention or solution makes another obsolete. The entire cultural system is in a state of dynamic transformation. Dewey’s focus on educational reform also prefigures McLuhan’s atten- tiveness to how the young struggle to process information in a media-saturated age. The French poststructuralists, in contrast, deconstruct and expose the insti- tutions and organization of modern knowledge without thinking about how they would improve matters outside their already highly educated coterie. In fact, they would reject the idea of improvement or reform as bourgeois. Dewey’s faith in democracy is another departure from French and German theory, with its Marxist premises. McLuhan was implacably opposed to Marxism because he clearly saw how capitalism has enhanced modern individualism, un- leashed creativity, and promoted social mobility. Dewey’s democratic ideals also connect to Leslie Fiedler, who published in the Old Left Partisan Review but whose vision of a pluralist, populist America descends more directly from Walt Whitman’s dream of all-embracing inclusiveness in the wake of the Civil War. McLuhan’s interests overlapped with Marxism in the area of institutional analy- sis: he hated bureaucacy and was one of the first, for example, to condemn the centralization and overspecialization of the contemporary university. The final late nineteenth-century American thinker who prefigured our triad is the economist Thorstein Veblen, who is explicitly cited as an influence by Norman O. Brown in Life Against Death. In his 1899 classic, The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen speculated about the psychological forces at work in the formation and activity of social institutions in a way that, in Brown’s view, antici- pated Freud. This American line of thought, which extrapolates from observation of actual human behavior rather than, in the French way, the dissection of verbal formulas, can be seen passing from Veblen to the eminent sociologist Erving Goffman, whose 1956 work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (cited in a later book by Brown) examines the creation and daily operation of social roles. The North American Intellectual Tradition 208 Goffman’s book, a primary text for my 1960s generation, was extensively borro- wed from without due acknowledgment by Foucault, and it is Goffman’s theories that one often hears flowing from the mouths of credulous Foucaldians. The primacy of the body in the North American intellectual tradition is one of our great distinctions. McLuhan’s classification of different eras as “acoustic” or “visual” as well as his emphasis on the “haptic” – that is, the sense of touch – meshes beautifully with the actual practice of the arts. Exploration of the body as a vehicle of thought and emotion is everywhere in the American arts, from the late nineteenth century on. It’s in Isadora Duncan’s freeing of the body through flowing drapery and lyrical, improvisatory dance. It’s in Martha Graham’s cre- ation of the vocabulary of modern dance through study of muscle contractions and visceral spasms and in the orientation of her movement by gravity toward the earth. It’s in the ferociously concentrated rehearsal technique of Lee Strasberg’s interpretation of the Stanislavsky “Method” in the Actor’s Studio. It’s in the Bla- ck Mountain school of poetry’s search for a new kind of rhythm and declamation following the organic pulses and respirations of the body. And it’s in the percus- siveness of our glorious popular music, from ragtime and Dixieland jazz through rhythm and blues to rock ‘n’ roll--the master art form of the 1960s that united us all. It is a scandal that American humanities professors are still forcing un- prepared undergraduates to read turgid French and German theorists rather than the linked triad of McLuhan, Fiedler, and Brown as interpreters of postwar re- ality. The philosophic tradition behind the poststructuralists was bankrupt even before their books arrived on these shores. European philosophy collapsed after Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. In their pessimism about objective reality as well as in their nihilistic politics, Husserl and Heidegger, Foucault’s precursors, were responding to specifically European problems, which would end in the disaster of two world wars. From our distant view at the dawn of a new millennium, surely it should be apparent that the despairing introversion of European philososphy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries happened precisely as mass media were rising to power in the wake of the industrial revolution. Mass communication, the gift of technology, was giving the people their voice and a public forum for their tastes, which always offend the educated elite. Marxist theory has never Camille Paglia 209 been able to adjust to the astounding success of the capitalist mass media, but snobbish, censorious, and now hackneyed Marxist formulations like “commodi- fication” are still being drilled into students by followers of the Frankfurt School. A fundamental problem with the poststructuralists is that they were narro- wly French thinkers who were struggling with the limitations of French discourse as, significantly, French political power was waning around the world. Ame- ricans who had absorbed McLuhan, Fiedler, and Brown had no need of posts- tructuralism, which is monotonously based on Saussurean linguistics, with its view of reality as mediated through language. Continental French speakers, with their rationalist Cartesian heritage, may have needed a Saussurean critique, but English speakers do not. That critique is already contained in English literature it- self, as it developed from the Middle English of Chaucer down to the avant-garde verbal experiments of James Joyce--whom both McLuhan and Brown studied and wrote about. The encyclopedic episodes of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) contain the whole history of language and rhetoric, and make Saussure both unnecessary and irrelevant. English is one of the richest and most complex languages in the world. It is a living art form down to its tiniest parts, which McLuhan recognized in his lifelong devotion to word lists and etymology. There are multiple layers in English--the foundation of concrete Anglo-Saxon monosyllables with the Greco- Roman overlay of abstract polysyllables brought by the Norman invasion, with its own lingering bequest of aristocratic household terms. In his plays, written at the birth of modern English, Shakespeare was the first to exploit those levels for serious and comic effects. Immersion in English literature, as it cascaded down the centuries, gives one a philosophic range because of the profusion of English word choices. Two, three, or four words might be possible, emerging from diffe- rent roots and periods: diction is determined by context. Hence English speakers develop a sense of social context – a hyperawareness of the dramatic situation to which words must be fit. The North American intellectual tradition began in my view in the mid- nineteenth century with the encounter of Romanticism, coming from British po- etry, with the assertive, pragmatic English spoken by North Americans – the plain style, originally Protestant, in the United States as well as Canada, with its strong, no-nonsense Scottish immigrants. It’s Romanticism, incidentally, that The North American Intellectual Tradition 210 Michel Foucault somehow completely missed in his bizarrely incomplete picture of modern intellectual history after the Enlightenment, which he was by no means the first to critique. McLuhan from his schooldays was steeped in the history of English poetry, and it remained his first love. Moreover, he heard his mother, a professional performer, recite poetry at home, so that he had a keen sense of oratory and the folk-loric oral tradition. At Cambridge University, he studied with the founders of the New Criticism, I. A. Richards and William Empson, and he adapted the technique of textual explication for his media work: McLuhan modernized the New Criticism by showing how close reading transfers to fields other than literature. The writer who did most to unite Romanticism with the North American plain style was Ralph Waldo Emerson, a poet and public lecturer who drew on the sermon genre but altered its climactic structure for aphorism, which often dissol- ves his essays into fragments. It is partly to Emerson that I trace McLuhan’s in- tellectual lineage –McLuhan’s aphorisms, or as we now say “sound bites”, were his public signature and may have interfered, to his dismay, with his production of conventional books and essays. It is to Emerson that Norman O. Brown’s strange 1966 book, Love’s Body, should be traced. Brown’s thematic chapter titles (“Liberty”, “Trinity”, “Unity”, “Boundary”) sound like Emerson’s titles in Nature, and his disconnected passa- ges of packed, vatic utterances and quotations are like Emersonian prose-poems. There are precedents in Emerson to McLuhan’s concern with the “extension of consciousness”, with circuits, “integral patterns,” and the “total inclusive field” of experience and perception. For example, Emerson says in “Circles”, “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second. Or notoriously in Na- ture in 1836, “I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me”. McLuhan’s two-way charting of technological advance and obsolescen- ce is anticipated in Emerson’s observation in “Self-Reliance” in 1840: “Socie- ty never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other... For everything that is given something is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts”. Emerson goes on to draw a Romantic analogy between nature and culture: “Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not”. Camille Paglia 211 Indeed it is the respect accorded to nature that I define as a primary cha- racteristic of the North American intellectual tradition. The claustrophobic world of poststructuralism sees nothing but oppressive society operating on passive, helpless mankind. Nature at its wildest and most sublime rarely impinges on Pa- ris – and when it does, as in the once-a-millennium storm winds that swept over France in late December 1999, 10,000 trees fall and the Cathedral of Notre Dame itself begins to crumble. We in North America, with its powerful, ever-changing weather systems, its vast geography, and monumental landmarks like Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon, know that nature is the ever-present ground of all human thought and action. Marshall McLuhan’s vastness of perception partly came, as his biographer Philip Marchand notes, from his origins in Alberta with its prairie landscape – exactly the kind of landscape, I would add, that inspired an American genius, the Wisconsin-born architect Frank Lloyd Wright, with his “prairie style” that has revolutionized residential design. Leslie Fiedler too, though born and toughened in urban Newark, New Jersey, became a big-sky Northerner whose work would bring American nature together with American history, ethnicity, and sexuality. Fiedler attended graduate school in the north country at the University of Wis- consin – where McLuhan had briefly taught in his first job in 1936. Fiedler began his career at Montana State University, where he taught from 1941 to 1964, after which he became an eminence for 35 years at the State University of New York at Buffalo, one of the snowiest cities in America. Norman O. Brown, interestin- gly enough, also attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin at the same time, receiving his Ph.D. a year after Fiedler received his. I too, despite my immigrant Italian lineage, claim the feisty independence of the Northerner: I was born, grew up, and attended college in the snowbelt of upstate central New York. I was raised, I like to say, breathing cold, clear Canadian air. Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman O. Brown, born within six years of each other (from 1911 to 1917), became models of the public intel- lectual for the baby boom generation born just after World War Two. Though an academic at a major university, McLuhan was always an outsider who became a citizen of the world, appearing on talk shows, advising business groups, and always trying to address a general audience. Fiedler too believed that a critic must speak the common language to the widest possible audience. Fiedler became a The North American Intellectual Tradition 212 culture hero to campus radicals everywhere when, because of his sponsorship of a student group advocating legalization of marijuana, he was arrested in 1967 and convicted, though he escaped a prison term when the charges were dropped for lack of evidence. The police raid on Fiedler’s Buffalo house was one of the most sensational events of my college years in Binghamton. In one stroke, Fiedler broke the genteel code of American academe. Norman O. Brown made memo- rable apparances to student groups (though I never saw him) and seemed to give his Dionysian imprimatur to the sexual revolution – for which he certainly lost credibility in the scholarly community. The North American synthesis of the pragmatic and the visionary in the works of McLuhan, Fiedler, and Brown is uniquely suited to analyze the swif- tly changing present of our age of technology. Mass media and communication, which have been developed and refined in the United States since the nineteenth- century rise of tabloid-style mass-market newspapers, cannot be fully understood with European models. Media domination, as we have known it since television captured the nation in the 1950s, is still unknown in Europe, where at-home In- ternet use too has barely begun. McLuhan himself was not the wholesale fan of pop culture that many think him; he called TV “a vile drug”, for example, and relegated it to lesser rooms of the house. McLuhan forecast what my generation lived, from transistor radios and stereo headphones to today’s 100 cable channels. But we baby boomers had the advantage of a traditional education in history and great books. I agree with social critic Neil Postman that we should be very concerned about the cultural quandary of American children raised on banal TV shows and violent movies. But the antidote, as I see it, is not to curb the rowdy pagan energies of pop but to reconstruct the counterbalancing citadel of primary education, which has so shockingly deteriorated over the past three decades. As for secondary education, it must be purged of desiccated European for- mulas, which burden and disable the student mind. We need to recover North American paradigms and metaphors, to restore the North American idiom to aca- demic discourse. Media and Internet communications are a Jamesian and Joycean “stream of consciousness,” fluid and mercurial, and our young people--from the brilliant Web entrepreneurs to the pirate hackers who harass institutions and dis- rupt e-commerce – occupy a radically different mental space than the valley of death of pre- and postwar Europe. Camille Paglia 213 As I know from my own work with the online magazine Salon, with its in- ternational readership, McLuhan’s “global village” has come to pass. The Web’s power of rapid response to breaking news events is making daily newspapers and even network TV seem slow and cumbersome. Every day, the Web is fulfilling the 1960s dreams of expanded perception or cosmic consciousness. In concluding this call for a reawakening of North American sensibility, let me cite Emerson’s exhortation in his 1837 lecture “The American Scholar”: “We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe,” he declares. Of Ameri- cans, Emerson vows, “We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak with our own minds”. Notas 1 Phd em Língua Inglesa pela Universidade de Yale e Professora da Universidade das Artes Philadelphia. Referências BROWN, Norman O. Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of His- tory. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1959. BROWN, Norman O. Love’s Body. New York: Random House, 1966. EMERSON, Ralph Waldo. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In- trod. Robert E. Spiller. Text estab. Alfred R. Ferguson. 5 vols. Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard UP, 1971-1994. [Note to copyeditor: contributors’ info applies only to Vol. 1 – no MLA or Chicago style for acknowledging different editors for subsequent volumes in multi-volume, multi-year, single-author works. Library catalogs use Spiller & Ferguson to identify this edition of Emerson’s Works. We can delete Spiller & Ferguson if you find that preferable.] FIEDLER, Leslie A. The Inadvertent Eipc: From “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to “Roots”. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979. FIEDLER, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Crite- rion, 1960. FOUCAULT, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1969. Trans. of L’archéologie du savoir. 1969. The North American Intellectual Tradition 214 FOUCAULT, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sci- ences. London: Tavistock, 1970. New York: Pantheon, 1971. Trans. of Les mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines. 1966. [note to copyeditor: no translator listed on library records or title & copyright pages.] FRYE, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Monograph no. 2. Edinburgh: U of Ediburgh Social Sciences Research Centre, 1956. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959. JAMES, William. Pragmatism. Ed. Fredson Bowers. Assoc. ed. Ignas K. Skrup- skelis. The Works of William James. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1975. MARCHAND, Philip. Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989. MARCUSE, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. Boston: Beacon, 1955. [note to copyeditor: English edition is apparently the first; German edition postdates English ed.] MCLUHAN, Marshall. The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. New York: Vanguard, 1951. MCLUHAN, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. New York: Signet-New American Library, 1964. MCLUHAN, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Introd. Lewis H. Lapham. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1994. “Pragmatism.” Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. SAUSSURE, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye in collab. with Albert Reidlinger. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York: Philosophical Library, 1959. Trans of Cours de linguistique générale. 916. VEBLEN, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions. New York: Macmillan, 1899. Camille Paglia