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17 - Forms of non-fiction: Innis, McLuhan, Frye, and Grant

from PART THREE - MODELS OF MODERNITY, POST-FIRST WORLD WAR

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2010

By
David Staines
Edited by
Coral Ann Howells  and
Eva-Marie Kröller
Coral Ann Howells
Affiliation:
University of Reading; University of London
Eva-Marie Kröller
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia, Vancouver
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Summary

In one of his final interviews, Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911–80) reflected on the people who had strongly influenced him. Harold Adams Innis (1894–1952), McLuhan claimed, “is the only man since the beginning of literacy 2,400 years ago who ever studied the effects of technology, and I think that is an amazing thing in view of the numbers of great minds that had this opportunity. He’s the only human being that ever studied the effects of literacy on the people who were literate.”

Harold Innis

A rural southwestern Ontarian by birth and upbringing, Innis graduated from McMaster University in History and Political Economy (BA, 1916), then enlisted and was sent overseas; the war in Europe was, for him, a deeply moral cause. “If I had no faith in Christianity I don’t think I would go, but it is as He said, you must desert everything take up the cross and follow me,” he wrote to his sister. The experience of the horrors of war, however, left him an avowed agnostic, robbing him of his Baptist faith and his plan to become a preacher.

Innis returned to McMaster for his master’s degree in Political Economy (1918), then went to the University of Chicago for his doctorate (1920). Under his supervisor, the economic historian Chester Whitney Wright, he wrote as his thesis, “A History of the Canadian Pacific Railway.” Although employment offers came his way, he declined these “on a chance that a Canadian university will send in an application.”

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The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature , pp. 335 - 354
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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