As computer technology insinuates itself more deeply into the social fabric, the first critic of the electronic age is receiving new scholarly attention. The latest addition to the literature is Glenn Willmott’s McLuhan, Or Modernism in Reverse. Willmott’s text is a detailed historical analysis of the evolution of McLuhan from his beginnings as a Cambridge literary critic to his becoming a critic of the electronic age, and his final elevation to media celebrity and postmodern prophet.

The book grew out of Willmott’s doctoral dissertation, and as such will demand significant intellectual energy from its readers. The investment will be repaid. While McLuhan’s aphorisms are well known, his varied influences are not. Willmott, by providing a thorough and exacting commentary on the development of McLuhan’s thought, illuminates a thinker of greater breadth and subtlety than is commonly recognized.

Displaying impressive scope, the author unveils how McLuhan’s early influences at Cambridge (T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, and F.R. Leavis) formed the intellectual basis that McLuhan subsequently transformed into his celebrated analysis of electronic media. Willmott’s ability to reveal the occult connections between the academic formalism of Cambridge literary criticism and the diagnosis of the dangers and potentials of new electronic media is testimony to his facility with the work of both McLuhan and the Cambridge critics.

The guiding thread linking the two sides of McLuhan’s thought is the concept of esthetic form. The Cambridge critics sought to isolate that which is unique to art, in abstraction from the content or meaning of particular works. Willmott shows how McLuhan took this notion and expanded it from its confinement to “high art.” He first began to apply this formal criticism to the products of pop culture, and subsequently developed it into an analysis of how the social environment affects our understanding of ourselves. It is this relation between social and historical context and self-understanding, Willmott writes, that is at the heart of McLuhan’s most famous slogan – “the medium is the message.”

Willmott is most successful where he sticks to an analysis of the development of McLuhan’s thought. Where the book fails is in relating this development to broader philosophical and political issues. The text wavers between clear explication of McLuhan’s ideas and wordy pronouncements on general philosophical and political ideas. The latter shed very little light. Thus, the overall success of the text is marred by the use of undefined philosophical terms, overblown claims, and an addiction to the use of increasingly tired postmodern jargon. Given these problems, the reader may leave the book having missed the message as a result of the medium.