American's transcend decline

[Terrance]

It's time for a recovery and reassessment of North American thinkers.
Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler and Norman O. Brown are the linked
triad
I would substitute for Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel
Foucault,
whose work belongs to ravaged postwar Europe and whose ideas transfer
poorly into the Anglo-American tradition. McLuhan, Fiedler and Brown
were
steeped in literature, classical to modern. They understood the creative
imagination, and they extended their insights into speculation about
history and
society. Their influence was positive and fruitful: They did not impose
their
system on acolytes but liberated a whole generation of students to think
freely
and to discover their own voices. 

The North American intellectual tradition began, I maintain, in the
encounter
of British Romanticism with assertive, pragmatic North American English
--
the Protestant plain style in both the U.S. and Canada, with its
no-nonsense
Scottish immigrants. The crucial transitional writer was Ralph Waldo
Emerson, the aphoristic poet and lecturer to whom I trace McLuhan's
intellectual lineage. McLuhan's daring aphorisms, or as we now say
"sound
bites," were his public signature.

BY CAMILLE PAGLIA

http://archive.salon.com/people/col/pagl/2000/03/04/inteltrad/print.html