Abstract

This essay deals with some communicative insights developed by Marshall McLuhan in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), with particular reference to its literary and rhetoric patterns. His concept of media as body extensions provides some relevant interpretative keys to our communicative condition, marked by the rapid shift of symbolic and experiential universes. This is why the transition from the oral civilization to the printing era may help us understand our media society. McLuhan probed the literary and philosophical past so as to investigate our current condition. The book can be read as an amazing journey into oral and written communication, thus foreseeing the advent of simultaneity and globalization.