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McLuhan's anomalous position within communication theory can be credited to the fact that he was developing a spatial model of communication. Unlike traditional models, which focused on the transmission of a message, McLuhan's model was concerned with the transformations in the relationship between message and context. Based on the notion of acoustic space, McLuhan's notion of spatial communication was processual, dynamic, and relational. He arrived at his theory through his reading of Canadian economic historian Harold Adams Innis, who had developed the notion that communication media exhibit biases toward space or time. McLuhan sought to address the spatial bias of contemporary communication systems by theorizing that electronic media were producing a dynamic space whose paradigm was the auditory (or acoustic) and which was counterposed to visual space. Any communication thus represented a relationship between what was communicated and the context in which it was communicated. Given that electronic media allowed for instant communication, communication took on an iconic quality, with communication taking place all at once, spatially, rather than in a linear fashion. By theorizing the context of communication, McLuhan was able to develop a theory of communication sensitive to the social and material emplotments of communications. The spatial bias of McLuhan's theory of communication has much in common with that of postmodernism, which provides a productive matrix for further research into McLuhan's theory of spatial communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay places current debates about the materiality of discourse into a Canadian context, tracing the querelle over materiality in which Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan engaged during a twenty-year span. Whereas Frye espoused the dematerialization of the social in favour of the (re)materialization of the literary as the social achievement of the ideal culture toward which literature gestures, McLuhan sought to formulate a theory of cultural production that emphasized the role of the (apparently) nonmaterial -- the invisibilia of media -- in the creation of social effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an essay criticizing the Frederick Philip Grove (FPG) scholarship on two levels: the sexual and the national. Homosocial context surrounding FPG; Biological view of sexuality founded on procreation; Three major movements in the FPG scholarship; Issue on the nationality of FPG; Translation of Browning's `A Blot in the Scutcheon' by FPG.