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 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."

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

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

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.

At the Speed of Light There is Only Illumination collects a dozen re-evaluative essays on Marshall McLuhan and his critical and theoretical legacy; from intellectual adventurer creating a complex architecture of ideas to cultural icon standing in line in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. Given McLuhan’s prominent status in many academic disciplines, the contributors reflect a multi-disciplinary background. John Moss and Linda Morra chose the essays from a gathering of McLuhan’s academic devotees. The contribution – from “McLuhan as Medium” and “McLuhan in Space” to “What McLuhan Got Wrong” and “Trouble in the Global Village” – to provide a kaleidoscope of new views. As Moss writes of the collected essays: “Some are big and some are small, some exegetic and some confessional, some stand as major statements and others are sidelong glances; some resonate with the concerns of public discourse and others are private or privileged or impious and provocative. Each consists of many parts, each a design on its own. They speak to each other...they may have come together as one version of what happened.”