person
Eighteenth-century satirist, present in The Gutenberg Galaxy as the writer who spelled out the postures of individual mind. Dialogue 73 makes him half of a pair: Pope catalogued the individual postures, Joyce the collective ones, and that division is what Bob uses to explain why McLuhan could appear as a Gnostic one minute and a Thomist the next without contradiction.
Across the dialogues
73
Set into a two-term structure — Pope's individual postures become the foil that makes Joyce's collective ones legible, and with them the whole account of McLuhan's shifting masks
Pope is invoked to establish that cataloguing postures is an old literary task, so McLuhan's own shifting masks can be read as a method with a pedigree rather than as inconsistency.
"Now remember he says in Gutenberg Galaxy that the postures of individual mind were spelled out by Alexander Pope."
Connections
contrasted withJames Joyce
Pope supplies the postures of individual mind; Joyce supplies the postures of collective mind.