Hugh Kenner, the literary critic who died on Monday aged 80, wrote on subjects as diverse as geodesic mathematics, the cartoons of Chuck Jones (creator of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd) and the effect of modern technology on literary imagery; he was best known, however, as a leading authority on American and Irish modernist writers, in particular Ezra Pound and James Joyce. —Hugh Kenner (1923-2003) (Telegraph)

Kenner’s book The Mechanic Muse was an important influence on my own dissertation. I never met the man, and I only quoted him a few times in my thesis, but when I first read an example of his technique for critiquing the technological images in literature, it was love at first sight. He hobnobbed with Marshal McCluhan, visited Ezra Pound in the insane asylum.

Wow. What a blogger he would have made.