McLuhan as Performance: Canadian Perspectives

McLuhan – Canada's pre-eminent media-theory explorer, raising and addressing historical and contemporary issues of and relationships among media and technology, society and culture – approached his material and his audience not only as a professor of English literature but also as a modernist literary artist/performer. In the opening sections of this essay I want to acknowledge him in this latter role, and link him to other literary modernists of his generation active in Canada: poet/ playwright and English professor Wilfred Watson, novelist and English professor Sheila Watson, novelist Malcolm Lowry, poet and English professor Earle Birney, poet Dorothy Livesay and a couple of other writers and a painter, Jack Shadbolt.

I also want to note that McLuhan drew on the performance practices – and, let me say at once, the media analyses – of such high modernists who preceded him as James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis. Janine Marchessault calls him a modernist performer in the avant-garde style of Joyce; Donald Theall calls him a prose poet and social satirist in the manner of Lewis.