Dramatic Theories of Voice in the Twentieth Century By Andrew Ki ...

place New Criticism afforded language led its adherents toward a view of language not as a simple and neutral medium of thought, as Aristotle's writing suggests, but as intimately bound with the forms of thought and cultural characteristics of its users.

According to Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan's biographer, New Criticism played a formative role in McLuhan's development. Born in Canada, McLuhan first earned a degree in English at the University of Manitoba, but in 1934 he then went to Cambridge and earned a BA, MA, and PhD in English, the last in 1943. Having studied New Criticism under Richards and Leavis at Cambridge and consuming Empson's book, McLuhan came to regard language as a medium of thought whose words carried, in their sounds, meanings and effects that eluded linguistic definition. In this regard he, like his teachers, resisted the trend in analytic philosophy to demand exactitude from language; instead, he saw language as interpenetrating consciousness to some degree. McLuhan's research interests took shape as he applied the premises of New Criticism to other human artifacts, like advertising, hoping to discover in them the cognitive and social effects that they might stimulate.¹⁵ McLuhan started teaching at the University of Toronto in 1946 and reached a turning point when he read Innis's Empire and Communications.¹⁶ In this work, Innis, a political economist, argues in detail a postulate he had been formulating loosely in previous publications, which proposes that different forms of communication technology force cognitive changes upon civilizations and that the changes become evident in political and economic organization. Besides the impact of writing on Plato's ancient Greece, Innis also considers the role of cuneiform and hieroglyphs in creating the empires of ancient Babylon and Egypt, the reliance of the Roman Empire on the propagation of written law, and the momentous effect of the printing press on the formation of modern Europe and North America.

McLuhan immediately appreciated the correlation between Innis's media theory and his own interests in the unconscious effects of language and other cultural products. Innis died in 1952, but McLuhan was inspired to assume and extend the research, first in a project funded by the Ford Foundation in the mid-1950s and then in a string of book-length