“For the oral man the literal text contains all possible levels of meaning.”

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 126

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "For the oral man the literal text contains all possible levels of meaning." by Marshall McLuhan?
Marshall McLuhan photo
Marshall McLuhan 416
Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor … 1911–1980

Related quotes

John Miles Foley photo

“We know now that cultures are not oral or literate; rather they employ a menu or spectrum of communicative strategies, some of them associated with texts, some with voices, and some with both.”

John Miles Foley (1947–2012) American literary scholar

"What's in a Sign?", in Signs of Orality. The Oral Tradition and its Influence in the Greek and Roman World, ed. E. Anne MacKay (1999), p. 3

Roland Barthes photo

“A work has two levels of meaning: literal and concealed.”

Roland Barthes (1915–1980) French philosopher, critic and literary theorist

Proposition 3
Variant translation: The Text can be approached, experienced, in reaction to the sign. The work closes on a signified. There are two modes of signification which can be attributed to this signified: either it is claimed to be evident and the work is then the object of a literal science, of philology, or else it is considered to be secret, ultimate, something to be sought out, and the work then falls under the scope of a hermeneutics, of an interpretation
From Work to Text (1971)
Context: A work has two levels of meaning: literal and concealed.
A Text, on the other hand is engaged in a movement … a deferral … a dilation of meaning … the play of signification.
Metonymy — the association of part to whole — characterized the logic of the Text.
In this sense the Text is "radically symbolic" and lacks closure.

Fernando Pessoa photo
Susan Sontag photo

“All meaning is intertextual. No text is complete or autonomous in itself; it needs to be read, and it is read, in relation to other texts.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Source: Textual politics: Discourse and social dynamics, 1995, p. 35

Boris Johnson photo

“Unlike the current occupant of the White House, he has no difficulty in orally extemporising a series of grammatical English sentences, each containing a main verb.”

Boris Johnson (1964) British politician, historian and journalist

endorsing Barack Obama, Telegraph Column, October 21, 2008
2000s, 2008

Dana Gioia photo
Georges Duhamel photo

“Is it possible to create a maintain a true culture, a strong and flourishing culture, through the medium of pictoral and oral apparatus?”

Georges Duhamel (1884–1966) French writer

Source: Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters] (1937), p. 21

“Technological competition ignites total war, which means it is not possible to contain the effects of a new technology to a limited sphere of human activity…”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Technopoly: the Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992)
Context: Technological competition ignites total war, which means it is not possible to contain the effects of a new technology to a limited sphere of human activity... What we need to consider about the computer has nothing to do with its efficiency as a teaching tool. We need to know in what ways it is altering our conception of learning, and how, in conjunction with television, it undermines the old idea of school.

Related topics