new book: _McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography_

[pynchonoid]

Of interest to many Pynchon readers, I would expect:

Richard Cavell
McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography. 
U of Toronto P, 2002. $65.00


reviewed at: 
<http://www.canlit.ca/reviews/unassigned/5846_Irmscher.html>

[...] Cavell successfully disputes the prevalent
notion of McLuhan as “vulgarizer” of Harold Innis:
McLuhan broke away from his predecessor when arguing
that space and time are categories that can never be
understood separately, that the objects we surround
ourselves with are process as well as product.
Nevertheless, he shared Innis’s sense that any
“re-organization of our perceptual lives” must have an
ethical dimension, and that the point of becoming
aware of the environments we have created is to alter
them, to turn them into, as McLuhan would call them,
“counter-environments”—expressions of our heightened
awareness that who we are can never be distinguished
from where we are. Canadians have been much maligned
for their alleged lack of a national identity, but for
McLuhan such absence was an opportunity. Canada, he
thought, needs more, not fewer, cultures. Here
dialogue will take place not between the established
“centers of civilization,” but in a decolonized, open
space inhabited by equal, yet always different,
partners in communication. Therefore, McLuhan had
little patience for “Norrie Frye’s” hankering after
classical decorum and timeless mythic meaning, arguing
instead that the interests of literature are not well
served by shunning its media age competitors. As
McLuhan saw it, the new electronic media have rendered
the traditional goal of artistic self-expression and
therefore also the distinction between “highbrow” and
“lowbrow” art meaningless. Cavell spends much time on
McLuhan’s protracted love affair with advertising,
which to him was the most powerful example of the a
new, public form of art, allowing consumers, now
liberated from the tyranny of the “private point of
view,” to breathe a collective sigh of relief:
“Advertisements function paradigmatically as
Happenings: they are anonymous, inclusive, often
intermedial, and require audience interaction” (p.
175). [...] 


=====
<http://www.pynchonoid.org/>

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM).
http://calendar.yahoo.com