Counterblasting Canada: Marshall McLuhan, Wyndham Lewis, Wilfrid Watson, and Sheila Watson ed. by Gregory Betts, Paul Hjartarson, and Kristine Smitka

2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 221-223
Author(s):  
David Staines
Keyword(s):  
Wyndham Lewis ◽  
Marshall Mcluhan ◽  
Sheila Watson

Watson, Sheila (1909–1998)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jana Millar Usiskin
Keyword(s):  
British Columbia ◽  
Michael Ondaatje ◽  
Daphne Marlatt ◽  
Wyndham Lewis ◽  
Marshall Mcluhan ◽  
University Of Alberta ◽  
University Of Toronto ◽  
University Of British Columbia ◽  
Sheila Watson ◽  
The University

Canadian writer Sheila Watson (1909–1998) is best known for her modernist novel The Double Hook (1959) about the redemptive struggles of a small, rural community as they deal with the murder of one of their members. Born Sheila Martin Doherty in New Westminster, BC, Watson received her BA, (Hons) in English (1931) and MA (1933) from the University of British Columbia. She taught elementary students in a number of rural schools in British Columbia before marrying Wilfred Watson in 1941. She then continued to teach in Toronto, in Vancouver at the University of British Columbia, and in Powell River, BC While living in Calgary during 1951–52, Watson completed The Double Hook, which was published to mixed reviews. After its publication, Watson began her PhD under he guidance of Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto and completed her dissertation Wyndham Lewis: Post Expressionist at the University of Alberta in 1961. While working as a professor at the University of Alberta, Watson continued to write and publish. She maintained correspondence with several Canadian scholars and writers, including Michael Ondaatje, George Bowering, and Daphne Marlatt. After her retirement in 1980, Sheila and her husband moved to Nanaimo, BC, where they died in 1998.

‘The machine man of 1925’

2019 ◽  
pp. 221-256
Author(s):  
Max Saunders
Keyword(s):  
Human Computer Interaction ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Wyndham Lewis ◽  
Marshall Mcluhan ◽  
Human Thought ◽  
Original Line ◽  
General Inability

This chapter moves beyond the human sciences, to develop the exploration (launched in the Introductions and Chapter 1) of the re-imagining of human nature and potentiality. It investigates the representation of the machine in the series, contrasting the volumes concerned with the dehumanizing effects of mechanized mass production with those taking a more nuanced and original line, arguing that the machine liberates human thought and creativity (a topic of evident relevance to today’s discussions of human-computer interaction and AI). It argues that To-Day and To-Morrow’s presentation of technology as prosthesis offers a more benign vision of mechanized futurity than the ‘prosthetic modernism’ of writers like Marinetti and Wyndham Lewis. H. Stafford Hatfield’s Automaton: or, The Future of the Mechanical Man (1928) is examined for the way in which it floats the possibility of a ‘mechanical brain’, yet is indicative of a general inability to predict the imminent electronic computer—thus raising a question of the limits of prediction in relation to thought-paradigms. A line is suggested from the series’ running together of technology, media and psychology, to the development of media studies, especially as articulated by Marshall McLuhan.

scholarly journals The spiral structure of Marshall McLuhan’s thinking

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Izabella Pruska Oldenhof ◽  
Robert K. Logan Logan
Keyword(s):  
Spiral Structure ◽  
Time Structure ◽  
Wyndham Lewis ◽  
Marshall Mcluhan ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
Cause And Effect ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

We examine the spiral structure of the thinking and the work of Marshall McLuhan, which we believe will provide a new way of viewing McLuhan’s work. In particular, we believe that the way he reversed figure and ground, reversed content and medium, reversed cause and effect, and the relationship he established between the content of a new medium and the older media it obsolesced all contain a spiral structure going back and forth in time. Finally, the time structure of his Laws of Media in which a new medium obsolesced an older medium, while retrieving an even older medium and then when pushed far enough flipped into a still newer medium has the feeling of a spiral. We will also examine the spiral structure of the thinking and work of those thinkers and artists that most influenced McLuhan such as Vico, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Joyce, TS Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticism movement. Keywords: spiral; McLuhan; reversal; figure/ground; Laws of Media; media; environment/anti-environment; cause; effect

scholarly journals Spiral and Vortex: Robert Smithson and the Cinematic Spaces of Wyndham Lewis and Marshall McLuhan

2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Lauder
Keyword(s):  
Media Studies ◽  
Wyndham Lewis ◽  
Marshall Mcluhan ◽  
Robert Smithson ◽  
Spatial Metaphors ◽  
Travel Writings ◽  
Spatial Discourse

Background The author argues for a reconsideration of Robert Smithson’s relationship to the spatial discourse and proto-media studies of Wyndham Lewis and his Canadian protégé Marshall McLuhan.Analysis  Through a comparative reading of a lesser-known Lewis text and Smithson’s photo-essays and related earthworks, the article sets out to re-evaluate the American artist’s mock-Platonic “earth maps” as mobilizing cinematic and spatial metaphors deployed by Lewis’ satirical travel writings; in particular, Lewis’ exploration of Atlantean images of postnational space as an alternative to a time-obsessed modernity in Filibusters in Barbary (1932).Conclusion and implications  The cinematic geographies of Smithson, Lewis, and McLuhan emerge as allied responses to, and radical reworkings of, Bergson’s discourse on time and media that materialize a shared critical optics and quest for utopia propelled by the lingering spectre of global conflict.RÉSUMÉ Contexte  Contexte l’auteur propose que l’on reconsidère la relation de Robert Smithson avec les discours spatiaux et les études proto-médiatiques de Wyndham Lewis et de son protégé canadien Marshall McLuhan.Analyse  Au moyen d’une lecture comparative d’un texte relativement obscur de Lewis et d’essais photographiques de Smithson et de ses œuvres d’art qui s’y rapportent, l’auteur entreprend de réévaluer les « cartes terrestres » prétendument platoniques de cet artiste américain, y voyant la mobilisation de métaphores filmiques et spatiales empruntées aux récits de voyage satiriques de Lewis, particulièrement sonFilibusters in Barbary (1932) où ce dernier évoque, comme alternative à une modernité obsédée par le temps, des images puissantes d’un espace post-national.Conclusion et implications Les géographies filmiques de Smithson, Lewis et McLuhan s’avèrent être des réponses complémentaires au discours sur le temps et les médias d’Henri Bergson ainsi que des remaniements radicaux de ce discours qui ensemble concrétisent une vision critique et une quête utopique partagées par les trois auteurs et suscitées par les conflits mondiaux dont l’impact se fait encore vivement ressentir à l’époque.

Sheila Watson as a Reader of Simone Weil: Decreation, Affliction, and Metaxu in the The Double Hook

2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (4) ◽  
pp. 669-690
Author(s):  
Kait Pinder
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Wyndham Lewis ◽  
Sheila Watson ◽  
Simone Weil ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Ethical Project

This article examines Sheila Watson’s interest in the notoriously difficult thought of the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil. Watson read Weil’s work in English and French throughout the 1950s, especially during the time she spent in Paris in 1955 and 1956. While critics have examined Watson’s Paris journals for her discussion of modernists such as Samuel Beckett and Wyndham Lewis, little attention has been paid to her synthesis of, and response to, Weil’s thought in the same pages. Contextualizing Watson’s revisions to The Double Hook in her sustained reading of Weil, this article argues that Weil’s thought informs Watson’s aesthetic and ethical project in the novel. The article analyses Watson’s understanding of three central concepts in Weil’s philosophy – decreation, affliction, and metaxu – and offers a Weilian reading of The Double Hook. By resituating Watson as a reader of Weil, the article also highlights the Canadian author’s belonging within a wider circle of women writers in the mid-century who, like Weil and Watson, also demanded unsentimental responses to violence and suffering.

scholarly journals From Literary Modernism to the Tantramar Marshes: Anticipating McLuhan in British and Canadian Media Theory and Practice

1993 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Tiessen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Media History ◽  
Media Theory ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Wyndham Lewis ◽  
Marshall Mcluhan

Abstract: This study offers brief sketches of four twentieth-century cultural analysts and activists. It examines their work and illustrates the extent to which a fairly sophisticated McLuhanesque sensibility was operating in Canada in intellectual and government circles from the 1920s to the 1940s, 10 years prior to the arrival of Marshall McLuhan. The four figures are John Grierson, Wyndham Lewis, Graham Spry, and Gerald Noxon, all of whom began their careers in England and played important roles in Canadian media history. Résumé: Cette étude offre de courts sketches de quatre activistes et analystes culturels du vingtième siècle. Elle examine leur travail et illustre qu'une sensibilité McLuhanesque assez sophistiquée opérait au Canada dans les cercles intellectuels et gouvernementaux, entre les années 1920 et 1940, dix ans avant l'arrivée de Marshall McLuhan. Les quatre personnages sont John Grierson, Wyndham Lewis, Graham Spry et Gerald Noxon; tous ont débuté leurs carrières en Angleterre et ont joué d'importants rôles dans l'histoire canadienne des médias.

scholarly journals The spiral structure of Marshall McLuhan’s thinking

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Izabella Pruska Oldenhof ◽  
Robert K. Logan Logan
Keyword(s):  
Spiral Structure ◽  
Time Structure ◽  
Wyndham Lewis ◽  
Marshall Mcluhan ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
Cause And Effect ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

We examine the spiral structure of the thinking and the work of Marshall McLuhan, which we believe will provide a new way of viewing McLuhan’s work. In particular, we believe that the way he reversed figure and ground, reversed content and medium, reversed cause and effect, and the relationship he established between the content of a new medium and the older media it obsolesced all contain a spiral structure going back and forth in time. Finally, the time structure of his Laws of Media in which a new medium obsolesced an older medium, while retrieving an even older medium and then when pushed far enough flipped into a still newer medium has the feeling of a spiral. We will also examine the spiral structure of the thinking and work of those thinkers and artists that most influenced McLuhan such as Vico, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Joyce, TS Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticism movement. Keywords: spiral; McLuhan; reversal; figure/ground; Laws of Media; media; environment/anti-environment; cause; effect

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