Modernism is one of the great manifold movements in literature and the arts. Responding with magnificent independence to inherited values and tastes, and with radical novelty to the future, varieties of modernism anxiously express both the ends of the Enlightenment and the beginnings of Postmodernism, and thus the feeling of a crisis that continues to haunt contemporary life. Modernity in Canada, stretching from the turn of the century to the 1950s, is a period marked by unprecedented urban and industrial growth, by urban and rural immigration from around the world, and by unique changes in power between regions, classes, races, and sexes. At the same time it is a period profoundly aware of the colonial past and its persistence, for good or ill, in the fragile economy and volatile culture of a new nation.

Unreal Country: Modernity in the Canadian Novel in English

Literature & Fiction

Willmott, Glenn

History & Criticism

McGill-Queen's University Press

Our lives are increasingly dominated by new forms of image, sound, data, and language media. Marshall McLuhan called this new order of things the Global Village, and he strove to be true to it as the media-popular `McLuhan.' Having little use for traditional critical forms or values, and courting instead the discourses of popular culture and big business, McLuhan displayed the authentic, ambivalent place of critical self-reflection in our media-centred world.  McLuhan, according to Willmott, must be understood as a vital link in a generation of modern and postmodern critics, one who extracted modernist forms and values from the deconstructions of postmodern culture, and one who forced into public view the emergence of the critical intellectual as `being-in-media.' Willmott's book fills the need for a first critical, historical, and theoretical re-reading of McLuhan's literary and cultural projects. He re-evaluates McLuhan as a thinker and writer who moved along the borders of academic and popular culture, and locates him as an integral presence in the history of modern critical thought. The book is divided into two parts, representing modern and postmodern periods. Willmott examines McLuhan's relationship to critical and aesthetic modernism, and political and historical sense of modernity in North America, from the early 1930s to the 1950s. This relationship led McLuhan to articulate and practise what Willmott calls a `modernism in reverse.' Willmott examines the postmodern practice of this critical aesthetic, from the 1950s to the 1970s, which entailed McLuhan's self-commodification in art, business, and popular culture. McLuhan, or Modernism in Reverse thus aims to retrace and synthesize McLuhan's work in order to illuminate his unexpected meaning and value for critical practice today.

Mcluhan or Modernism in Reverse (THEORY/CULTURE)

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division

Our lives are increasingly dominated by new forms of image, sound, data, and language media. Marshall McLuhan called this new order of things the Global Village, and he strove to be true to it as the media-popular `McLuhan.' Having little use for traditional critical forms or values, and courting instead the discourses of popular culture and big business, McLuhan displayed the authentic, ambivalent place of critical self-reflection in our media-centred world. McLuhan, according to Willmott, must be understood as a vital link in a generation of modern and postmodern critics, one who extracted modernist forms and values from the deconstructions of postmodern culture, and one who forced into public view the emergence of the critical intellectual as `being-in-media.' Willmott's book fills the need for a first critical, historical, and theoretical re-reading of McLuhan's literary and cultural projects. He re-evaluates McLuhan as a thinker and writer who moved along the borders of academic and popular culture, and locates him as an integral presence in the history of modern critical thought. 
The book is divided into two parts, representing modern and postmodern periods. Willmott examines McLuhan's relationship to critical and aesthetic modernism, and political and historical sense of modernity in North America, from the early 1930s to the 1950s. This relationship led McLuhan to articulate and practise what Willmott calls a `modernism in reverse.' Willmott examines the postmodern practice of this critical aesthetic, from the 1950s to the 1970s, which entailed McLuhan's self-commodification in art, business, and popular culture. 
McLuhan, or Modernism in Reverse thus aims to retrace and synthesize McLuhan's work in order to illuminate his unexpected meaning and value for critical practice today.

McLuhan, or Modernism in Reverse (Theory / Culture)

University of Toronto Press

From T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney to C. S. Lewis’s Aslan, modern writing has been filled with strange new hybrid human-animal creatures. Feeding on consumer society, these ‘modern primitive’ figures often challenge mainstream ideals by discovering wealth in habitats and resources rather than in economic exchange. What compels our post-human identification with these characters?Modern Animalism explores representations of the human-animal ‘problem creature’ in a broad assortment of literature and comics from the late nineteenth century to the present — including authors such as Woolf, Joyce, Lawrence, Moore, Murakami, Pullman, Coetzee, and Atwood, and comics creators such as McCay, Herriman, Miyazaki, and Morrison. Drawing on a wide range of scholarship, from environmental economics to psychology, Glenn Willmott examines modern and post-modern allegories of the environment, the animal, and economics, highlighting the enduring and seductive appeal of the modern primitive in an age when living with less remains a powerful cultural wish.

Modern Animalism: Habitats of Scarcity and Wealth in Comics and Literature

In a world awash in awesome, sensual technological experiences, wonder has diverse powers, including awakening us to unexpected ecological intimacies and entanglements. Yet this deeply felt experience―at once cognitive, aesthetic, and ethical―has been dangerously neglected in our cultural education. In order to cultivate the imaginative empathy and caution this feeling evokes, we need to teach ourselves and others to read for wonder. This book begins by unfolding the nature and artifice of wonder as a human capacity and as a fabricated experience. Ranging across poetry, foodstuffs, movies, tropical islands, wonder cabinets, apes, abstract painting, penguins and more, Reading for Wonder offers an anatomy of wonder in transmedia poetics, then explores its ethical power and political risks from early modern times to the present day. To save ourselves and the teeming life of our planet, indeed to flourish, we must liberate wonder from ideologies of enchantment and disenchantment, understand its workings and their ethical ambivalence, and give it a clear language and voice.

Reading for Wonder: Ecology, Ethics, Enchantment (Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment)

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Willmott, Glenn. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Willmott, Glenn

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Willmott, Glenn. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Unreal Country: Modernity in the Canadian Novel in English

Mcluhan or Modernism in Reverse (THEORY/CULTURE)

McLuhan, or Modernism in Reverse (Theory / Culture)

Modern Animalism: Habitats of Scarcity and Wealth in Comics and Literature

Reading for Wonder: Ecology, Ethics, Enchantment (Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment)

Reading for Wonder: Ecology, Ethics, Enchantment (Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment)