_The roots of hypertext can be traced to many sources but none more unusual than the trio of Vannevar Bush whose Memex concept derived directly from the military-scientific sector, Ted Nelson with his Xanadu dream of an informational docuverse, and Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian literary intellectual with a prescient understanding of an emerging electronic environment.

In this course we'll explore the rhetoric of Marshall McLuhan, a rhetoric intentionally provocative and opaque, celebrating a holistic and poetic sensibility while trumpeting the end of the Newtonian age. Our task will not be to understand McLuhan. Ultimately, his metaphoric style makes that impossible. In one sense, logical dissection of McLuhan's theory would distort and undermine it. His rhetoric is about response, about the future, about a rhetorical orientation to the world more akin to the Sophists'. So rely on your intuition; experience McLuhan--or more properly, experience your own electronic existence through McLuhan.