Literary scholar whose 1993 study Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism Bob reaches for when the conversation turns to the nineteenth-century roots of McLuhan's eye/ear thinking. Sherry's book gives Bob a documented lineage: the French "ideologues" — Condorcet, Sieyès, Destutt de Tracy — who founded "ideology" as a study of images and sense-impressions, the tradition's reactionary turn under Saint-Simon and Comte, and its rekindling in the men of 1914. Bob uses Sherry to argue that McLuhan "didn't make this up," but "came out of an obscure tradition" of sensory-battle thought that "nobody knows about in the McLuhan world." The page tracks Sherry as Bob's evidence for that buried genealogy.
Across the dialogues
Introduced as Bob's scholarly warrant for the hidden sensory-battle lineage — the literary historian whose Pound-and-Lewis study shows the eye-ear war running unnoticed through the nineteenth century into modernism
Bob invokes Sherry's book as proof that the eye-ear sensory battle ran through the nineteenth century unnoticed in McLuhan scholarship.
"as Vincent Sherry's book shows, that this eye-ear sensory battle goes on in the 19th century, which nobody knows about."
Bob positions the modernist "men of 1914" as reacting to that sensory tradition, with McLuhan later able to complete what they only bounced off.
"And the men of 1914 were bouncing off it, but I have a perspective of later, and I can apply it. I can complete it."
Bob names the source — Sherry's Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (1993) — the book he is quoting on the French ideologues.
"It's called Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism. And it came out in 93."
Connections
Sherry's Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (1993) is Bob's source for the nineteenth-century eye-ear "ideologue" tradition that the men of 1914 inherited.
Sherry reads Pound and Lewis as heirs to a French "ideology" — the study of images and sense-impressions running from Condorcet and Tracy through Saint-Simon and Comte.