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''The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man'' (1st Ed.: The Vanguard Press, NY, 1951)〔reissued by Gingko Press, 2002 ISBN 1-58423-050-9〕 is a pioneering study of popular culture by Herbert Marshall McLuhan, treating newspapers, comics, and advertisements as poetic texts.〔"McLuhan, Marshall (1911-80)" from ''Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, Second Edition''. Benson, Eugene; Conolly, L.W. (eds). London: Routledge, 2005.〕 Like his later 1962 book ''The Gutenberg Galaxy'', ''The Mechanical Bride'' is unique and composed of a number of short essays that can be read in any order – what he styled the "mosaic approach" to writing a book. Each essay begins with a newspaper or magazine article or an advertisement, followed by McLuhan's analysis thereof. The analyses bear on aesthetic considerations as well as on the implications behind the imagery and text. McLuhan chose the ads and articles included in his book not only to draw attention to their symbolism and their implications for the corporate entities that created and disseminated them, but also to mull over what such advertising implies about the wider society at which it is aimed. == Summary == McLuhan is concerned by the size and the intentions of the North American culture industry. "Ours is the first age in which many thousands of the best-trained individual minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind," McLuhan writes in his preface to the book. He believes everyone is kept in a "helpless state engendered by prolonged mental rutting is the effect of many ads and much entertainment alike."〔"Preface to the original edition" by Marshall McLuhan. ''The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man''. Herbert Marshall McLuhan. 1951. Ginko Press, 2002. pp. v〕 McLuhan hopes ''Bride'' can reverse this process. By using artifacts of popular culture as a means to enlighten the public, McLuhan hopes the public can consciously observe the effects of popular culture on them.〔 McLuhan compares his method to the sailor in Edgar Allan Poe's short-story "A Descent into the Maelstrom." The sailor, McLuhan writes, saves himself by studying the whirlpool and by co-operating with it.〔 Likewise, the book is not interested in attacking the strong currents of advertising, radio, and the press. The book argues anger and outrage are not the proper responses to the culture industry. "The time for anger...is in the early stages of a new process," McLuhan says, "the present stage is extremely advanced."〔 Amusement is the proper strategy. This is why McLuhan uses punning questions that border on silly or absurd after each visual example. On the technique of amusement McLuhan quotes Poe's sailor, when he's locked into the whirlpool's walls looking at floating objects: :"I ''must'' have been delirious, for I even sought ''amusement'' in speculating upon the relative velocities of their several descents towards the foam below." (original )〔 This amusement, McLuhan argues, born "of his rational detachment as a spectator of his own situation,"〔 saved the sailor's life. By adopting the position of Poe's sailor, readers of ''Bride'' can escape from the whirlpool of popular culture. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Mechanical Bride」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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