Such is the title of my graduate course at Rikkyo this year. The class will begin tomorrow. I will be discussing three major works of social theory in the latter half of the XXth century: Elias Canetti's Masse und Macht, Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy, and René Girard's La violence et le sacré. All of them I've been carrying since 1981.
It's so consoling to know that Hugh Kenner, the great Hugh Kenner, was once McLuhan's student. And so was Walter Ong, even if Walter was about the same age as Marshall. Canada is an interesting country!
