In 1914, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound—the founders of vorticism—undertook an unprecedented analysis of the present, its technologies, communication, politics, and architecture. The essays in Counterblasting Canada trace the influence of vorticism on Marshall McLuhan and Canadian Modernism. Building on the initial accomplishment of the magazine Blast, McLuhan’s subsequent Counterblast, and the network of artistic and intellectual relationships that flourished in Canadian vorticism, the contributors offer groundbreaking examinations of postwar Canadian literary culture, particularly the legacies of Sheila and Wilfred Watson. Intended primarily for scholars of literature and communications, Counterblasting Canada explores a crucial and long-overlooked strand in Canadian cultural and literary history.
Contributors: Gregory Betts, Adam Hammond, Paul Hjartarson, Dean Irvine, Elena Lamberti, Philip Monk, Linda M. Morra, Kristine Smitka, Leon Surette, Paul Tiessen, Adam Welch, Darren Wershler.
Gregory Betts is the Chancellor's Chair for Research Excellence at Brock University and the director of the Centre for Canadian Studies. He is the author of Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations (2013) as well as six books of experimental poetry. He is currently the artistic director of the Festival of Readers in St. Catharines.
Paul Hjartarson is Professor Emeritus in English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. His most recent book, co-authored with S.C. Neuman and EMiC UA, is The Thinking Heart: The Literary Archive of Wilfred Watson (UAP 2014).
Kristine Smitka teaches in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. To better understand the relationship between print and digital forms of publishing, her research focuses on the paperback book as a medium that defies the old vs. new media binary.
XI Acknowledgements
XIII Introduction // Gregory Betts, Paul Hjartarson, and Kristine Smitka
Analepsis
1 Remembering McLuhan // Leon Surette
The Art of Being Read
2 The New Canadian Vortex: Marshall McLuhan and the Avant-Garde Function of Counter-Environments // Gregory Betts
3 Watson, McLuhan (& Lewis): Conscious (Modernist) Solitudes, Challenging Canadians // Elena Lamberti
4 Excellent Internationalists: How Sheila Watson and Marshall McLuhan Made Wyndham Lewis Influential // Adam Hammond
II The Antennae of the Race
5 Dispatches from the DEW Line: McLuhan, Anti-Environments, and Visual Art across the Canada–US Border, 1966–1973 // Adam Welch
6 Wilfred Watson, Playwright: Writing (to) McLuhan // Paul Tiessen
7 Marshall McLuhan, General Idea, and Me! // Philip Monk
III Art and Anti-Environment
8 Sheila Watson, Wyndham Lewis, and Men without Art // Dean Irvine
9 “His Name Is Felix”: Artist as Catalytic Agent and the Counter-Environment in Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook // Linda M. Morra
10 Magic, Monstrosity, and “the Mechanization of Death”: Sheila Watson and Marshall McLuhan’s Dialogue on Photography // Kristine Smitka
Prolepsis
11 Marshall McLuhan as Vanishing Mediator // Darren Wershler
277 Works Cited
293 Contributors
295 Index
