McLuhan and Symbolist Communication

Andrea Lombardinilo is a tenured lecturer and Assistant Professor in the Sociology of Cultural and Communicative Processes at the Gabriele d’Annunzio University, Chieti-Pescara (Italy). He carries out research on literary communication and sociology of literature, with particular reference to the narrative and symbolic representations of modern identity. His interests also include sociology of higher education, with a focus on innovation reform and institutional communication within the university system.

• CONTENTS: Metamorphosis and transformation of awareness – Symbolism as parataxis: McLuhan and the social function of writing – Catholic humanism and modern letters: Symbolic interaction according to McLuhan – «The oral traditions of aphoristic learning»: McLuhan and Senecan symbolism – The dawn of symbolist communication: McLuhan, Dante, and the «dolce stil novo» – «The Machiavellian mind»: The symbolism of the establishment – Vico and the typographic university: The knowledge of symbols – Pope and Leopardi: The (symbolic) fall-out of the typographic world – «The reasoning Spectre»: William Blake and the symbolic vision – For a grammar of symbols: McLuhan, the Pre-Raphaelites, and Dante’s mark – Edgar Allan Poe: Symbolism as investigation – Baudelaire and symbolist poets: The mental facts of the electric age – The memory is the message: Cicero, T. S. Eliot, and the rhetorical spirals – Communication as a social probe – Interview with Derrick de Kerckhove: «Symbolism, like electricity, is acting at a distance».

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