Product Description

The first book to propose that Marshall McLuhan be read as a spatial theorist, McLuhan in Space argues that space is the single most consistent concept in McLuhan's vast and eclectic body of work. Richard Cavell demonstrates how McLuhan extended insights derived from advances in physics and artistic experimentation into a theory of acoustic space, which he then used to challenge the assumptions of visual space that had been produced through 500 years of print culture.

The notion of acoustic space provided McLuhan with a heuristic probe of prodigious range, allowing him to examine critically the many social and cultural forms of contemporary media production. It also enabled him to cross over intellectually from the purely theoretical realm into that of artistic production, where his interests in radical notions of spatial production were shared by a range of avant garde artists from bp Nichol to Glenn Gould, from John Cage to the Fluxus artists - an artistic milieu in which McLuhan increasingly came to situate his work. Cavell's book is the first to examine McLuhan's work in light of this artistic backdrop, and the first to examine his contribution to Canadian studies.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6989291 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 360 pages

About the Author
Richard Cavell is a professor in the Department of English and the founding director of the International Canadian Studies Centre at the University of British Columbia.

Customer Reviews

An insightful, history of McL., background, and influence.
Mr. Cavell's McLuhan in Space is an important academic examination of Mcluhan's provenance and legacy; and that praise is also its chief handicap, for its style will please only those in the ivory tower. And that is too bad, because his assessment of McLuhan is accurate. If it fails to escape the formal dialectical style McLuhan eschewed, it does describe the method McLuhan used in sympathetic and insightful terms. The theme here is the resonant interval, in and between different sensory spaces, and between discordant, seemingly unrelated ideas drawn from physics and rhetoric. Cavell handles the first easily, and casts profound hints about the second. He does not leap himself, but traces the trajectory of many leaps McLuhan made; or, if you prefer, he solves the crime after it has been committed. For those who need proof of McLuhan's importance it is a valuable work.