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.

I feel fortunate indeed that McLuhan published his central work, “Understanding Media,” in the very year — 1964 — that I entered college. Fiedler’s “Love and Death in the American Novel” and Brown’s “Life Against Death” had appeared just five years before.

McLuhan’s pioneering examination of the revolution wrought by electronic media in Gutenberg’s print culture demonstrated how history could be reinterpreted with terms bridging high and popular culture. He had a breathtaking sweep of vision and a charming aptitude for the startling example. McLuhan’s irreverent, aphoristic wit was perfectly attuned to the brash spirit of my generation, with its absurdist “happenings” and its taste for zinging one-liners — in the satiric style of Lenny Bruce or the gnomic manner of Zen sages and Hindu gurus.

“Understanding Media,” which had a tremendous impact on me at a pivotal moment in my development, is a landmark of cultural analysis. It contains an epic panorama of Western culture: Greek myth, Shakespeare, William Blake, James Joyce, Pablo Picasso and Margaret Mead mingle with the Marx Brothers amid an “Alice in Wonderland” swirl of clocks, comic books, alphabets, telephones and typewriters. In its picaresque form and carnivalesque tone, “Understanding Media” resembles Petronius Arbiter’s “Satyricon,” with its vivid picture of Nero’s Rome. McLuhan finds the key to our overloaded cultural environment, and his swift rhythms, playful tone and deft touch make academic semiotics look ponderous, pretentious and pointlessly abstract.

My argument is that the North American intellectuals, typified by McLuhan, Fiedler and Brown, achieved a new fusion of ideas — a sensory pragmatism or engagement with concrete experience, rooted in the body, and at the same time a visionary celebration of artistic metaspace — that is, the fictive realm of art, fantasy and belief projected by great poetry and prefiguring our own cyberspace.

North American philosophers from the late 19th century on turned away from the metaphysical preoccupations and dour worldview of European thinkers. The pragmatism of William James was based on his early study of anatomy and physiology. James’ portrait of consciousness as an active agent anticipated McLuhan’s identification of modern media as “extensions” of the senses. John Dewey’s theories were also grounded in the senses, and his focus on educational reform prefigured McLuhan’s attentiveness to how the young process information in our media-saturated age. Dewey’s faith in democracy paralleled McLuhan’s opposition to Marxism, flowing from his recognition of how capitalism, in creating mass media, enhanced individualism and promoted social mobility.

The primacy of the body in the North American intellectual tradition is one of our great distinctions. McLuhan’s classification of different eras as “acoustic” or “visual” and his emphasis on the “haptic,” the sense of touch, meshes beautifully with the American arts. Exploration of the body inspired the revolutionary choreography of Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham; the Stanislavskian “Method” of Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio; the organic pulses and respirations of the Black Mountain school of poetry; and the percussive rhythms of our glorious popular music from ragtime to rock ‘n’ roll.

European philosophy collapsed after Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. The post-structuralists, following the nihilist Husserl and Heidegger, were narrowly French thinkers who were struggling with the rationalism of French discourse. But North Americans who had absorbed McLuhan, Fiedler and Brown had no need for post-structuralism, with its Saussurean view of reality “mediated” through language. English speakers possess their own critique of language, contained in English literature itself from Chaucer’s Middle English and Shakespeare’s protean early modern English to the avant-garde experiments of Joyce, whom McLuhan, a lover of etymology, closely studied.

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.

It is the Romantic respect for nature that I define as a primary characteristic of the North American intellectual tradition. The claustrophobic world of post-structuralism sees nothing but oppressive society operating on passive, helpless mankind. Nature at its wildest and most sublime rarely impinges on Paris. We in North America, however, with its powerful, ever-changing weather systems, its vast geography and monumental landmarks like Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon, know that nature is the ever-present ground of all human thought and action.

McLuhan’s vastness of perception partly came, as biographer Philip Marchand notes, from his prairie origins in Alberta — exactly the kind of landscape, in fact, that inspired the hugely influential “prairie style” of an American genius, architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Fiedler taught for 23 years in big-sky Montana and for over 30 years in snowy Buffalo. He and Brown attended graduate school in the north country of Wisconsin, where McLuhan began his teaching career. As a native of the snow belt of upstate New York, I too claim the feisty independence of the Northerner. I was raised, I like to say, breathing cold, clear Canadian air.

The North American synthesis of the pragmatic and the visionary in McLuhan, Fiedler and Brown is uniquely suited for analyzing the swifly changing present of our age of technology. Mass media and communication, which were developed and refined in the U.S. since the 19th century rise of mass-market newspapers, cannot be fully understood with European models. It was McLuhan who forecast what my generation lived, from transistor radios and stereo headphones to today’s 100 cable channels.

Education must be purged of desiccated European formulas, which burden and disable the student mind. We must recover North American paradigms and metaphors, to restore the North American idiom to academic discourse. Media and Internet communications are a Jamesian and Joycean “stream of consciousness,” fluid and mercurial, and our young people — from the brilliant Web entrepreneurs to the ingenious pirate hackers — occupy a radically different mental space than the valley of death of pre- and postwar Europe. As I know from my work with Salon, McLuhan’s “global village” has come to pass. Every day, the Web is fulfilling the 1960s dream of expanded perception or cosmic consciousness.

In his 1837 lecture “The American Scholar,” Emerson says, “We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.” Of Americans, he vows, “We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak with our own minds.”

It began when I was in the midst of a particularly gruesome period of under-employment and depression, having decided to go out on my own as a freelance designer at the exact moment that the economy collapsed. It was positively, well, Shakespearean. Finding free entertainment was quite a challenge, and so one day, while flipping through an actual newspaper, I noticed an article about the Shakespeare Allowed! project and decided to go see what it was all about. I showed up at the library the first Saturday of the month and was amazed to see 40 eager people jammed into a tiny conference room, books in hand, ready to read “The Comedy of Errors.” I knew within 10 minutes that I’d be busy the first Saturday of every month.

As far back as high school, Shakespeare seemed like something I could admire but never truly love or understand. Like everyone ever born, I had to memorize and recite (disastrously, in the end) Mark Antony’s “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech in English class, but that was about the extent of my Shakesperience. But here I was, in a roomful of everyday people, reading in their everyday voices, and as the lines flew by and the pages turned, I saw — or, rather, heard — a whole world opening up to me. Shakespeare no longer seemed impenetrable. And I had a sneaky feeling there was nothing going on in my life that he didn’t have an angle on. If I showed up every month, I’d discover them all.

The first few times I hid in the corner and read along silently. It took a few months before a freakishly low turnout forced me to sit at the grown-up table and read aloud from “The Merry Wives of Windsor.” At first, it wasn’t exactly a natural feeling, and no matter how many times I peeked ahead to see which line I’d get, the words never quite tripped off my tongue. I mangled a lot of lines. But there was no denying the thrill I felt when I managed to get to the end of a longish speech and realized there was a grin a mile wide on my face. Suddenly I wanted all the long speeches, all the big moments. From that moment on, the library would have to be on fire for me to give up my reading chair.

My unemployment dragged on for a year, half bad economy, half lack of ambition. Twelve Shakespeare plays. The very idea of having another play to read kept me going from month to month. Sure, I might not have been able to pay my mortgage or eat anything other than spaghetti for weeks on end, but once a month I could lament the loss of my Juliet and then drink a vial of poison. Or, as Henry V, I could return to England, where ne’er from France arrived more happy men. In comparison to Romeo and Prince Hal, I didn’t really have that many problems. My depression began to lift, and I started sitting at my desk more often, calling and emailing people, looking for work. Miraculously, after a few tiny freelance jobs, a client offered me a job, the one I still have today.

But still I kept going to read Shakespeare aloud. And it became clear to me that there was a debt to pay. To the Shakespeare Festival, to the library, to Shakespeare himself, for getting me through an extremely dark time. I started telling everyone within earshot about the program so that more people would come. The first year, I volunteered to work at Shakespeare in the Park over a dozen steaming Tennessee August nights (I now know “Love’s Labours Lost” by heart) and worked the crowd with my donation bucket, talking my head off about reading Shakespeare aloud. People donated money and scurried away, pointing at the grinning crazy person. The second year, finally employed, I donated more money than I’ve ever donated to any organization in my life as thanks for providing me with so much pleasure. It was the most fun I’d ever had writing a check. I didn’t even try to write it off.

The project also made me a better reader. In the beginning, I’d read and read and have no clue what I was saying; we were three-fourths of the way through “The Merchant of Venice” before I realized Shylock wasn’t the Merchant of the title.  But as we worked through the canon, I found myself discovering that the whole point of the project — to simply read the plays aloud — got me halfway to understanding the text. It was amazing how that text seeped into me without my even knowing it. While reading “King Lear,” Lear’s final death speech (“Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more, Never, never, never, never, never!”) fell to me, and I had no idea I was even understanding it until I got to those five “nevers. ” Shakespeare didn’t give me just one to say, he gave me five. Five. Five grieving nevers, spoken by a heartbroken, dying king. To my surprise, I was in such a state of tears I almost had to pass the rest of the speech to the person next to me. After that, I was known as “the guy who cried.” When, almost inevitably, Mark Antony’s ”Friends, Romans, countrymen …” speech came my way, I repeated half of it from memory, having kept it stored somewhere after my fumbled high school recitation. I had no idea I still remembered it, but there I was, riding the unforgettable bicycle of Shakespeare.

We read the last play — “The Two Noble Kinsmen” — last month. This weekend, we’ll meet at the library for catered hors d’oeuvres and we’ll talk about the plays that pleased and surprised us (“Merchant” and “Pericles,” which would get staged more often if people knew it was full of pirates and zombie princesses) and the ones we were puzzled by (“Timon of Athens,” “All’s Well That Ends Well”). We’ll probably be a little sad and a lot smug. Then we’ll all separate and go home and flip the calendar to January, and mark the first Saturday of the month, when Shakespeare Allowed! begins all over again with “Henry VI, Part 1.” Three more years of mistaken identities, jealous rages and brooding Danes. I’ll be there reading the plays again, with a funny little group of misfit toys who’ve all managed to find this one thing we all adore, for all different reasons. I love having a job now, but I’ll never take a job that keeps me from my perpetual Saturday noon dates. Shakespeare saved my life, and I owe him that much.

It seemed so perfect, so beyond the dreams of every vampire-loving, space-cowboy wannabe and iambic-pentameter aficionado (and we are legion, people), that the whole thing struck many as an elaborate prank. Nathan Fillion as Dogberry? Really? It’s not even our birthday! But after much checking of calendars to make sure this is not the first day of April, fans are slowly switching from guarded skepticism to slavering anticipation. It’s real, all right. The filmmakers promise that the movie, a modern take on the original opposites attract rom-com, “should be completed by early spring and headed for the festival circuit” — because “it is fancy.”

The film is the first production from Bellwether, a “micro-studio” created by Whedon and Kai Cole for “small, independent narratives for all media.” Whedon told Entertainment Weekly Monday that after wrapping up the A-list, Marvel blockbuster-to-be “The Avengers,” he and his wife had planned a nice long vacation. “And she said, ‘Let’s not take the vacation. Make a movie instead.” For the guy who whipped up the Emmy-winning “Dr. Horrible” as a distraction during the writer’s strike, sure, why not?

Shot in just 12 days, “Much Ado” appears to be the greatest Whedon cast reunion ever. Amy Acker is the tart-tongued Beatrice, while Alexis Denisof plays her so-wrong-he’s-right sparring partner Benedick. It’s the Fred and Wesley payoff “Angel” fans have been waiting years for. “Dollhouse” vets Fran Kranz and Reed Diamond are the easily duped Claudio and the wise Don Pedro. “Firefly’s” Sean Maher is the scheming Don John, and even Tom Lenk (“Buffy’s” sweetest bad guy ever) is on board. Newcomer Jillian Morgese plays the beautiful, besmirched Hero.

The idea of Whedon — a guy very comfortable in the milieu of superheroes and butt-kicking — taking on the Bard might initially seem a little … unexpected. But Whedon has brilliantly articulated his regard for “strong women” throughout his career. And they don’t come much stronger than Beatrice, a woman who, unlike Shakespeare’s famous shrew Kate, never gets emotionally abused into submission. The big themes of Shakespeare – family, sex, betrayal, violence and clever wordplay – they are all over Whedon’s body of work. As he told the Hollywood Reporter, “The text is to me a deconstruction of the idea of love, which is ironic, since the entire production is a love letter — to the text, to the cast, even to the house it’s shot in.” Whedon filmed the entire production on his own grounds.

The glory of Shakespeare – and the glory of Whedon – is the depth of passion so beautifully evident in their work, a devotion that’s both touching and deeply inspiring. Whedon, surely the hardest working God among the Comic-Con crowd, told EW that “You make the time and you make it work if you really, really want it.” Desire. Perseverance. Ultimate triumph. Who doesn’t love a story with a happy ending?

As a rule, I’m leery of novels in which one of the characters has the same name as the author. Once upon a time, this seemed a clever gambit, calling attention to (among other things) the too-common tendency for readers to confuse novelists with their creations. By now, however, it’s gotten a bit stale, and provokes many readers into rolling their eyes and muttering darkly about “postmodern tricks.”

Nevertheless, “The Tragedy of Arthur” earns an exemption from such skepticism. This is a novel about authorship — real, false and contested — yet it’s far from the sort of arch and arid exercise in formalist tail-swallowing that most people think of when they refer to “postmodern tricks.” The novel is, indeed, a tragedy of authorship, but it is also the story of a man whose self-inflicted, tragicomic woes are as affecting and wincingly believable as those endured by the hero of any conventional fiction. That Arthur’s spectacular crash-and-burn comes nestled in a web of ingenious and very funny literary allusions only makes it that much more of a treat.

Here’s the premise: Arthur’s narration is the introduction to the play, which makes up the final third of the novel (and is a fine Shakespearean pastiche). Although he once (briefly) believed it to be genuine, he’s now convinced it was forged by his father (also named Arthur Phillips) — no matter what forensic and literary scholars say to the contrary. Trapped in an elaborate legal snare that makes it impossible for him to withdraw the thing from publication, Arthur has, however, retained the right to force his disillusioned introduction into the book and to bicker in the footnotes with the scholarly editor retained by his publisher.

Fuming, Arthur explains how he found himself in this excruciating situation. He describes an early childhood of idyllic companionship with his twin sister, Dana, and his charming father, who beguiles him with a telescope that shows people on Saturn looking back at the boy with their own telescopes. Later, he enlists both children in creating bogus crop circles in a farmer’s field. The father portrays his deceits as a campaign to replenish “the world’s vanishing faith in wonder,” but since he also applies his forgery skills to making a living, he ends up doing several stints in jail, breaking his daughter’s heart, ruining his marriage and enraging his son.

“I loved him without reservations until reservations were required,” Arthur explains, but the truth is a bit more complicated. Even before the first arrest, he was jealous of the bond between his father and his sister, cemented by their shared adoration of Shakespeare, a writer who leaves Arthur cold. Every so often, the disgruntled son takes a break from his narrative to rant about bardolatry, which he derides as “a trick of perspective, a rolling boulder of PR, a general cowardliness in us, a desire for heroes and easy answers,” and it must be said that some of his jibes deliver palpable hits. Does Shakespeare epitomize what we find great in literature, Arthur asks, or have we cut our conception of greatness to fit his form because we want so badly to believe that “one guy had it all”?

And now a word about the extracurricular attractions of “The Tragedy of Arthur.” Surely the modern world’s most extravagant bardolater is Yale professor Harold Bloom, who, as Arthur puts it, “traveled all the way to the maximalist and insane thesis that Shakespeare invented how people now live, communicate and think.” What Arthur doesn’t explain is that Bloom is perhaps most famous for “The Anxiety of Influence,” a book that advanced the theory that every great writer is locked in an oedipal struggle with the great writers of the previous generation and that these competitive feelings fuel artistic inspiration. Arthur is no exception. “You’re the first person ever to suffer from a double oedipal complex,” is how Dana puts it. “And one of your dads is four hundred years old.”

But if the fictional Arthur fantasizes about surpassing Shakespeare, the real-life Phillips has a different artistic daddy in mind, a writer whose name is never mentioned in “The Tragedy of Arthur,” although he is referred to once, obliquely. Phillips’ novel is, of course, a tribute to Vladimir Nabokov’s “Pale Fire,” which takes the form of an annotated long poem that is eventually submerged in the ravings of its demented and homicidal editor. Phillips’ Nabokovian flourishes are on ample display in “The Tragedy of Arthur,” as when he compares a snail to an “ornate, restless 2″ or worries that his father’s forgery will find favor with an academic champion, “some tenure-famished conniver ready to authenticate to make a name.”

But I’ll stop there, for fear that this will come to resemble Mary McCarthy’s famous review of “Pale Fire,” a piece titled “A Bolt From the Blue,” that is — in my opinion — over-celebrated. The review consists almost entirely of a listing of Nabokov’s literary references, and amounts to little more than McCarthy showing off her parochial-school erudition. (Literary critics, too — even the female ones! — have their oedipal grudges.)

Besides, you don’t need to know all this for “The Tragedy of Arthur” to work as a novel about a man whose refusal to believe that he is sufficiently loved causes him to alienate the people who really do love him. Like a lot of us, Arthur half-recognizes what he’s doing, but just can’t stop himself. “I refused to resemble my father in any way,” is how he describes his attitude at one crucial juncture, and of course that’s exactly whom he ends up resembling. There’s irony in that, but not the facile, sterile irony that many people think of when they talk about postmodern tricks. Instead, this is the hard-earned irony of lived experience, and if it sometimes laughs, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t known its share of tears.

Which is not to say it’s, like, amazing or anything. Taymor approaches Shakespeare’s last play (unless it isn’t; that issue, like everything else about the greatest dramatist of the English tradition, is disputed) with great respect, staying largely true to its impressive text and general narrative outline. Her interpretations and interpolations range from brilliant to indifferent to extremely silly; as Taymor surely knows, there’s nothing especially revolutionary in asking Helen Mirren to play the central role of Prospera (i.e., Prospero), the deposed duke/duchess of Milan turned white-magic practitioner. (Vanessa Redgrave played a gender-neutral Prospero on the London stage 10 years ago.) What it does get you is, well, Helen Mirren performing one of Shakespeare’s most complicated characters, which can make up for a lot of other problems.

The thing about “The Tempest” is that there’s almost no way to bring something new to this tremendously allegorical and ambiguous play, which is highly self-conscious and very much unlike anything else Shakespeare wrote — is it a comedy? a romance? a “masque”? — and may be the most reinterpreted, overanalyzed and deconstructed literary work in the Western tradition. Since the play was first performed in the 17th century, viewers have seen Prospero’s final decision to abjure his “rough magic” and break his staff as a metaphor for Shakespeare’s own decision to end his playwriting career. More recently, Prospero’s relationship with Ariel, his “airy spirit” servant, and Caliban, his deformed, island-born slave, have been understood in terms of colonial and/or psychoanalytic theory: love/hate, black/white, North/South, ego/Id.

I suppose in offering a traditional rendering, or nearly so — it’s set on an island, with characters more or less in Elizabethan dress, Ariel (Ben Whishaw) as a naked holographic sprite and Caliban (Djimon Hounsou) as a near-naked, mud-encrusted African — Taymor is allowing us to pick up the story and run in whichever direction we choose. But I can’t help wishing this “Tempest” had more of a distinctive personality. Instead, it waxes and wanes with its cast, some of whom are fully up to the task posed by Shakespearean dialogue and some of whom just aren’t.

Hounsou gives a powerful physical performance, but simply can’t be understood speaking Caliban’s difficult blank verse about half the time. It’s no good being a proto-Frantz Fanon colonial rebel if we can’t make out what you’re trying to say. (He’s better when quieter, as when reassuring newcomers: “Be not afraid, the isle is full of noises/ Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.”) Felicity Jones and Reeve Carney, as the young lovers Miranda and Ferdinand, are merely dull. Some of the best scenes in the movie involve stage veterans like David Strathairn, Chris Cooper and Alan Cumming, playing the nefarious if subsidiary trio of King Alonso of Naples, Prospera’s brother Antonio and the Iago-lite Sebastian.

If you’ve seen the trailers, you’ll know that English comedian and not-quite movie star Russell Brand shows up as the buffoonish Trinculo, playing him as yet another of Brand’s Cockney rock-star caricatures. Thing is, that fits pretty well with the dimwit character, who briefly becomes — along with his drunken buddy Stephano (Alfred Molina) — an instrument in Caliban’s planned insurrection against Prospera’s rule. Those enjoyments aside, this “Tempest” is all about Mirren, who plays the aging female mage with a mixture of conqueror’s arrogance and motherly sadness, lending her final words about the rebellious Caliban — “this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine” — a tragic ambivalence. (She does not call him a “demi-devil” and “bastard” in the same breath, as Prospero does in the play.)

Lovely as it is to hear Mirren read some of the most challenging lines ever written in our language, Prospero does not look, to our eyes, like an entirely sympathetic figure (not that he necessarily did 400 years ago either), and making him female does not relieve him of the white man’s burden. Ultimately Taymor’s reading of “The Tempest” is more dutiful than exciting, and it’s strangely bereft of the visual imagination and diabolical machinery for which her theatrical productions are known. Perhaps more than any other Shakespeare play, this one has evaded successful translation from stage to screen. Derek Jarman’s homoerotic reimagining from 1980 and Paul Mazursky’s lightweight modern-language version made two years later are all but forgotten. I admire Peter Greenaway’s “Prospero’s Books” for what it is, which is a self-referential digital art project using Shakespeare’s text as one of its elements (along with lots of naked flesh). But none of those films really comes close to capturing the dense and nettlesome mysteries of “The Tempest,” and this earnest effort doesn’t either. Is “Forbidden Planet,” the 1950s sci-fi reworking, with Robbie the Robot as Ariel and an invisible, perhaps imaginary Caliban, still the best movie version?