Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye


Book Description

Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye are two of Canada’s central cultural figures, colleagues and rivals whose careers unfolded in curious harmony even as their intellectual engagement was antagonistic. Poet, novelist, essayist and philosopher B.W. Powe, who studied with both of these formidable and influential intellectuals, presents an exploration of their lives and work in Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye: Apocalypse and Alchemy. Powe considers the existence of a unique visionary tradition of Canadian humanism and argues that McLuhan and Frye represent fraught but complementary approaches to the study of literature and to the broader engagement with culture. Examining their eloquent but often acid responses to each other, Powe exposes the scholarly controversies and personal conflicts that erupted between them, and notably the great commonalities in their writing and biographies. Using interviews, letters, notebooks, and their published texts, Powe offers a new alchemy of their thought, in which he combines the philosophical hallmarks of McLuhan’s “The medium is the message” and Frye’s “the great code.”




Marshall McLuhan


Book Description

A new look at the man who gave us ideas "the medium is the message" and "global village".




The Educated Imagination


Book Description

Explores the value and uses of literature in our time. Dr. Frye offers ideas for the teaching of literature at lower school levels, designed both to promote an early interest and to lead the student to the knowledge and experience found in the study of literature.




The University of Toronto


Book Description

Anyone who attended the University or who is interested in the growth of Canada's intellectual heritage will enjoy this compelling and magisterial history.




The Gutenberg Galaxy


Book Description

Since its first appearance in 1962, the impact of The Gutenberg Galaxy has been felt around the world. It gave us the concept of the global village; that phrase has now been translated, along with the rest of the book, into twelve languages, from Japanese to Serbo-Croat. It helped establish Marshall McLuhan as the original 'media guru.' More than 200,000 copies are in print. The reissue of this landmark book reflects the continuing importance of McLuhan's work for contemporary readers.




The Toronto School of Communication Theory


Book Description

While never formally recognized as a school of thought in its time, the work of a number of University of Toronto scholars over several decades – most notably Harold Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan – formulated a number of original attempts to conceptualize communication as a phenomenon, and launched radical and innovative conjectures about its consequences. This landmark collection of essays re-assesses the existence, and re-evaluates the contribution, of the so-called Toronto School of Communication. While the theories of Innis and McLuhan are notoriously resistant to neat encapsulation, some general themes have emerged in scholarly attempts to situate them within the discipline of communications studies that they helped to define. Three such themes – focus on the effects and consequences of communications, emphasis on communications as a process rather than as structure, and a sharp focus on the technology of communication, or the ‘medium’ – are the most fundamental in characterizing the unique perspective of the Toronto School. This collection not only represents a crucial step in defining the ‘Toronto School,’ it also provides close analysis of the ideas of its individual members.




Reception of Northrop Frye


Book Description

The Reception of Northrup Frye takes a thorough accounting of the presence of Frye in existing works and argues against Frye's diminishing status as an important critical voice.




The Divine Daughter


Book Description

Ever feel swept up in a sea of novelty? When did the new become more important than the true? Andrew Gilchrist found a remedy to today's nausea of novelty in the most familiar elements of narrative and music. He has composed a new arrangement from the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, Northrop Frye, Bernard Lonergan, and Jordan Peterson, weaving together a promising relationship between what we believe and how we live. This book starts a conversation at the crossroads of art, literature, religion, and psychology. And it begins with the oldest of stories. A boy fell in love with a girl and sung her a song. Each chapter in this book charts a series of helpful symbols and sounds, drawing attention to the melodies, rhythms and tempos that make up our most common experiences. The scientific revolution gave birth to a new understanding of the relationship between observer and observed, lover and beloved. That birth has changed the song. However, we have not welcomed this new daughter into the family with a proper name or fully recognized her part in our spiritual development. With her wisdom, we too might find hope and delight in the back and forth journey between tradition and innovation. Could her compelling voice and playful character help us prepare for the greatest roles of our lives?




Northrop Frye Unbuttoned


Book Description




The Critical Twilight (Routledge Revivals)


Book Description

First published in 1977, this book was the first to map extensively the ideological typography of the Anglo-American tradition of literary theory. It interrogates, comprehensively and in detail, the assumptions and categorical development within critical ideas from I. A. Richards and T. S. Eliot, through John Crowe Ransom and the New Criticism, to Northrop Frye and Marshall NcLuhan. This analysis reveals the Anglo-American tradition of literary-cultural theory is most properly intelligible within the overall field of social consciousness as an ideology of progressive cultural rationalization. Against a background of ideological development since nineteenth-century Romanticism, John Fekete illuminates the boundaries of literary ideology in relation to the shapes and changes of modern culture and society.