Abstract

The purpose of this synthesis is to deconstruct the medium of Marshall McLuhan’s prose as an anti-environment for the medium of traditional academic writing. By placing McLuhan’s own theory in dialogue with the founding principles of linguistic anthropology, I will argue that McLuhan’s authorial tactics—a subject of his long-term repudiation by the academic community on the whole—adhered to the tenets of the Electric Age, and were thus inherently incomprehensible to those who negotiated academic prose as a medium locked within the media environment of the Print Age.