from Molinaro, Matie and others, eds. LETTERS OF MARSHALL MCLUHAN. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1987. McLuhan's Ph.D. thesis, accepted by Cambridge in 1943, was The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time. The pamphleteer Thomas Nashe 1567-1601, who had been a student at St John's College, Cambridge, wrote several dramas and satires in the decade before his early death, along with the first picaresque romance in English, The Unfortunate Traveller or The Life of Jacke Wilton, 1594, a tale of adventure that includes much literary parody and pastiche. The thesis, as explained in McLuhan's abstract, focused on the conflict that existed in the world of sixteenth century learning between those who were for or against the patristic method based on grammar, dialectics, and rhetoric, in theology and formal expression, particularly on the quarrel between Gabriel Harvey, c. 1550-1631, who turned his back on classical rhetoric after leaving Cambridge, and Nashe, who became a daring exponent of the traditional patristic program of learning and eloquence. The thesis also includes a history of the trivium, the medieval university course of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. McLuhan discusses his thesis in a letter to Tom Wolfe of October 25, 1965. ===================================================================== from Molinaro, Matie and others, eds. LETTERS OF MARSHALL MCLUHAN. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1987. October 25, 1965 Dear Tom [Wolfe] (1) Just a note about the Thomas Nashe dissertation. (2) Studying Nashe's style led me to look at the rhetorical education of his day. I soon got on to the history of this form of symbolic action. Having tracked it back to (5)th Century Athens, I moved forward, relating the rhetorical program to the dialetical studies, and especially, to the grammatical studies. Plato's Cratylus presents a theory of language as the key to an inclusive consciousness of human culture much in the style of Finnegans Wake. Philologists since the Renaissance have pooh-poohed this inclusive approach, but it lasted until the time of Bishop Sprat and got going again with the Symbolists. (3) In the age of Kenneth Burke and William Empson it is once more totally acceptable. (4) Cicero and Varro (5) in the Roman world kept alive and flourishing the idea of language as an inclusive traditional consciousness. They taught it as a key to the mysteries of being and of power. Their program was taken over by St. Augustine as the charter of medieval education. Both the exegesis and the stylistics of the Church Fathers enhanced the whole tradition. Christian humanism in the 16th century gave the Patristic program ie., that of the Church Fathers a mighty boost. Peter Ramus thought he had devised an instrument for cutting it down to manageable size. Francis Bacon thought that the linguistic program could be extended to the entire book of Nature. Thomas Nashe used all aspects of the Patristic program for polemic and satire. Hence I called my dissertation The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time. Nashe is a Patristic humanist using all the latest journalistic techniques of Aretino (6) to prompt the traditional program. This brought him into head-on conflict with the Puritan left-wing of the English Church. I have learned so much about the entire problem since writing the thesis that I have hesitated to go ahead with publication without complete re-writing. In terms of your own interests in American studies, you can see how the American South remained faithful to the humanist and Ciceronian tradition whereas the Puritan and technological North followed the course of Peter Ramus in schematizing language and stripping words of their traditional attributes. Paradoxically, it is the North that continues the tradition of the abstract Schoolman. (7) Equally paradoxically, it was the Puritanical Pound and Eliot who steered American culture back into the traditional fold of linguistic awareness. I hope that these notes may have some use for you, Tom. Call on me for any help that you think I can provide. Cordially. (1) Tom Wolfe b. 1931 the American author of brilliant essays on contemporary American culture, written in what has been described as a baroque pop style. attracted attention with his first collection of articles. The Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby 1965. He corresponded with McLuhan and saw him several times in New York, Toronto, and San Francisco between 1965 and 1978. The letters to McLuhan from Wolfe who is also a graphic artist were handwritten, in rust coloured ink, in a freewheeling italic script with occasional graphic ornamentation that expressed his wit and warmth. In 1965 Wolfe wrote a memorable portrait of McLuhan. What If He Is Right? See page 330, note 1. McLuhan refers to this in a double-page spread pp. 212-3, entitled Sheep in Wolfe's Clothing, in his Culture Is Our Business 1970. (2) For a description of McLuhan's Ph.D. dissertation on Thomas Nashe, see page 103, note 4. (3) Thomas Sprat 1635-1713 Bishop of Rochester, wrote the History of the Royal Society of London 1667, in which he defended a close, naked, natural writing style. The Symbolists, a group of late-century French poets Mallarme Verlaine, Rimbaud, Laforgue, reacted against realism, direct expression, precise description, and explicit analogy by advocating the importance of suggestion and evocation and the power of symbol and metaphor to convey subjective emotion and the element of mystery in human existence. (4) Kenneth Burke b. 1897, American literary critic, philosopher, and poet among whose books are several works of linguistic analysis and The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action 1941. For Sir William Empson 1906-84, see page 462, note 2. (5) Marcus Terentius Varro 116-27B.C., was a Roman scholar of the Latin language, the author of De Lingua Latina. (6) Pietro Aretino 1492-1556, of Arezzo, Italy, was the author of five comedies and a tragedy and other satirical works, and was mentioned by Nashe one of the wittiest knaves God ever made, in the Unfortunate Traveller and by Milton in the Areopagitica. (7) This was discussed by McLuhan in his 1944 essay Edgar Poe's Tradition, Sewanee Review, vol. 12, no. 1, January 1944.