Search

The article focuses on the implications of the intellectual legacy of Marshall McLuhan for the study of literature and humanities in Canada. It comments that the literary studies made by McLuhan were crucial to his own theories of how media shape messages, affecting literature studies and humanities at large. According to the author, McLuhan's studies affects the communication theories applied in the world of mass media.

The article discusses various reports published within the journal including one on utopian themes in contemporary advertising by Shane Gunster and another on cultural studies by Sourayan Mookerjea.

Examines the impact of the increasing hegemony of electronic mediation on the relationship between space and text reflected in the novel "The English Patient," by Michael Ondaatje. Implications of the notion that the language of space has assumed an important place in literary and cultural studies as depicted in the novel; Parts of the novel that signal the collision of its various spaces; Significant problems posed by the displacement of surfaces in the concluding section of the novel.

Presents an article on teaching Canadian literature to students. Analysis of the book `Survival: A Strobic Guide,' by Michael Turner; Approach in teaching Canadian literature; Information on the novel `Basic Black With Pearls,' by Helen Weinzweig.

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.

Focuses on the Canadian obsession with the North, which informs its literature and criticisms alike. Canadian literature's resistance to Romanticism; Reference to Wiebe's work `A Discovery of Strangers'; Technologies often brought to the fore in accounts of the North; Reason why northern expeditions continually emphasize technology.

Presents the essay `Where Is Frye? Or, Theorizing Postcolonial Space.'

Analyzes the discourses between literary writer Walt Whitman and his biographer, Richard Bucke. Influence of Whitman's writings on Bucke; Bucke's homosocial relationship with Whitman; Discursive practices of Bucke and Whitman; Role played in the Bucke-Whitman discourse of the cross-border relationship between the United States and Canada.

The article discusses the history of the book "Understanding Media" by Marshall McLuhan, focusing on its influences, publication, and critical reception. It notes that the book, released in 1964, developed from McLuhan's "Report on Project in Understanding New Media" and changed as media did. The legacy of the book is also examined it terms of its effects on media studies.