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Thats almost humorous, ..."national heritage".... I definitely don't think that his ideas were patriotic or nationalist in any way, in fact they were the complete opposite.
Originally posted by Echtelion
Thats almost humorous, ..."national heritage".... I definitely don't think that his ideas were patriotic or nationalist in any way, in fact they were the complete opposite.
Writings don,t have to be patriotic to be deemed as national heritage... the government made it a national heritage about the same way as he would do to a building, or a natural reserve. But here it's being used as a device to control access to the writings, for protecting the intellectual property. There might have been a contract between the university where Mcluhan was working and the Federal governement in order to retain some of his books. Not all books written by university teachers or researchers go out of a faculty... universities have themselves a way to restrain knowledge to the very "elected few" (post-grad students and teachers), so it doesn't surprise me very much, even if that's revolting.
I guess you can have access to this special collection with the same motives than in every special collection of any major library: by being on an academic research or study which is related in some ways to McLuhan's work, as an example... Special collections are not only for controversial books or writings that the authorities would'nt want you to read, sometimes it's jsut because they are very rare and old books which could be easily destroyed if placed into the public section of a library. But McLuhan's writings obviously fall into the category of "controversial" books, since they don,t have any real historical value themselves.
[edit on 9/5/05 by Echtelion]
[edit on 9/5/05 by Echtelion]