The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time

Really nice to have a copy instead of the hassle of inter-library loan. don't get me wrong - i love inter-library loan, but the loan periods are short, and this is a dense piece of writing, and i'm a slow reader. sorta wonder whether Gingko will bring out McLuhan's MA thesis on George Meredith. I've never read Meredith. I read the Unfortunate Traveller and the Anatomy of Absurdity in preparation for reading this. Not time wasted at all - good stuff this Nashe guy - but turns out this is less about Nashe than about the Trivium using Nashe as a lab rat. McLuhan hopes to bring Nashe's work to wider attention but says that Bacon or Donne would have suited his needs just as well, perhaps better. i am a poor excuse for a scholar, having no Latin and less Greek, but I wrestle diligently with my Loeb Library editions, okey, not my Loeb Library editions, although i do have two volumes of Augustine, but the library's Loeb Library editions, and there are moments as i am reading this when, if you squinted and gazed down on me from a great height, i might appear to be some form of scholar. so i struggle with it, not having the historical nailed down, not having a grasp of the theological, barely apprehending the classical tradition. in a way this is an ideal crash course except it is the deep end and i'm taking on gulping mouthfuls of chlorinated water as i thrash about. still, i keep jumping in and if i dont wave my arms too much i can float for a few pages. every time i emerge from this book i feel both elevated and abysmal - elevated by mere association, abysmal in my limited capacity.

Thank you, Gingko Press. Here finally are the roots of all that followed, the back story of every judgment or cryptic comment McLuhan ever made. Here is the restless, rash scholar as young Turk, inventing for himself a necessary intellectual history to place Thomas Nashe in his proper context- and what McLuhan quickly recognized was that this history bears continually on all cultural transformations. Here is the scholarship the academics said McLuhan lacked; rather he shows where the scholars themselves were lacking, and why he abandoned their methods in favor of Joyce, Eliot, et al, a way of living in and experiencing any present with both understanding and electric immediacy. Some of this appears in a very compressed manner in Eric McLuhan's 'The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake'; it is developed more slowly in this book. Here McLuhan defined the struggle between art and science as between rhetoric and dialectic. Here is Mcluhan the patristic scholar showing that conservative theology does not mean ossified or dialectical; it means having at hand all the rich tools of the tradition with which to renew the present (remember, this is during the time when de Lubac, who tread the same waters, was under censure). Here McLuhan discovered percept in a living Trivium where dialectic was balanced by rhetoric. The war is indeed in the Word. . .

McLuhan's notion of grammar and rhetoric involves much more than sentence structure and fancy talking. There's not a great deal in the book about Thomas Nashe, and it's certainly not a biography. It's more about the cultural background of "the wars of the ancients and moderns" with Nashe as an example of one of the last ancients. One of the sad elements of his "last stand" is that his antagonists, the Harveys, probably never even knew what he was talking about since they lacked the literary depth to understand his imagery. They knew they were being attacked by a very clever man, but they were already sleep-walking nominalists.

To quote an external site: "His thesis advisor was F.P. Wilson, chair of the English Department at the University of London. Corinne McLuhan describes Wilson as "very erudite, very kind, very genial." When McLuhan completed the thesis, in April of 1943, the War dispersed all questions of going to England to defend it. "We sent the thesis from St. Louis," Corinne McLuhan says. "We sent four copies in batches." Some weeks later they heard from Wilson. "We don't have the letter," Corinne says. "But he wrote Marshall, saying he had learned more from that thesis, than from anything else he'd read in his lifetime."" http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss1/1_1art6.htm I couldn't agree with Wilson more. It's not because you learn something "new" per se, but because what he presents in this book completely changes the structure you'd built to encapsulate/understand Western thought and its progress since Ancient Greece.

The depth of this work should be studied by anyone interested in learning the root of Western Culture! This is a very comprehensive work that gives a view of the mind of McLuhan before he hit the stage!!!

Wow, that puts it in perspective

fast and accurate

Highly recommended!