English (Fall/Winter) Two Canadian Theorists Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye

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1 English (Fall/Winter) Two Canadian Theorists Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye Professor B.W. Powe Thursday, 11:30-2:30 B.W. Powe 352 Stong College, Extension:

2 Term One On Marshall McLuhan 1. The Book of Probes, Marshall McLuhan, edited by David Carson, Eric McLuhan, W. Terrence Gordon (Gingko Press) 2. Essays by Marshall McLuhan: - A Historical Approach to the Media (1955) - Environment to Anti-Environment, Notes on Burroughs, in Media Research, Technology, Art, Communication, edited by Michael A. Moos (Gordon & Beach Arts International) - Pound, Eliot, and the Rhetoric of The Waste Land (1978) *Available in handouts, during class (but also available on line) 3. The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot, both versions: 1920 unedited version (available on line, goo.gl/9ydm1/z), and the 1922 canonic version, edited by Ezra Pound (many editions available) 4. Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs 5. John Cage, Silence (Wesleyan) 6. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Penguin)

3 Term Two On Northrop Frye 1. The Educated Imagination (Anansi) 2. The Great Code (Penguin) 3. The Double Vision (available edition) 4. William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience (Oxford) 5. The Anthropology of Water, in Plainwater, Anne Carson (Knopf) 6. The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot (the 1922 canonic edition; widely available) 7. Journey to the East, Hermann Hesse One cinematic experience: Star Wars: The Force Awakens; to be explored through a McLuhan figure/ground perception, as audience phenomenon, pop-cult expression, example of technological extensions and use of digital format (3D); to be examined through a Frye lens, as example of The Great Code in action and the Identity Code Theme.

4 Guiding Words We are on the verge of the apocalypse. In fact, we are living in it. Marshall McLuhan, The Medium and the Light I think that the age we are moving into will probably seem the most religious ever. We are already there. McLuhan, The Medium and the Light Nevertheless it isn t new knowledge but a new power of knowledge, a new courage to know, that s important. We must cling to a God who approves of blasphemy because he hates Jehovah & Nobodaddy & Zeus & Isvara & all the other kings of terrors & tyrants of the soul. To a God who appreciates obscenity because he looks not into the secrets of our hearts but into the hearts of our secrets, & knows that our bloodfilled genitals & cocking guts are the real battlefields Northrop Frye, Notebooks on the Bible and other Religious Texts, Notebook 3 the soul is an immaculate virgin, ready for the divine child. Then it goes out and gets fucked by the world all day long, & staggers back a baggy-eyed old whore, still hoping that after a sleep the Moment of purification will come again. Frye, Notebook 3

5 McLuhan Interview with Pierre Babin, 1977: The electric world, which is acoustic, intuitive, holistic invites [us] into total immersion, and it doesn t lean towards goals or objectives but focuses only on a certain quality of life. Babin: Could we call this a return to mysticism? McLuhan: I think so. Gutenberg emphasized the process of outering and Marconi marked the start of its ebb. The Medium and the Light The media extensions of man are the hominization of the planet, it is the second phase of the original creation. Marshall McLuhan, The Global Village Man shall not live by bread alone, but by prophecies as well. That is, primary concerns, for conscious human beings, must have a spiritual as well as a physical dimension. Freedom of movement is not simply the freedom to take a plane to Vancouver; it must include freedom of thought and criticism. Northrop Frye, The Double Vision In the double vision of a spiritual and a physical world simultaneously present, every moment we have lived through we have also died out of into another order. Frye, The Double Vision

6 Course Description This course examines and explores the pointcounterpoint Canadian theoretical tradition of Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye. This is a course devoted to exploring the perceptions and thoughts, the provocative and inspiring works, of these two seminal and influential thinkers. It is also a course that explores the influence of their work on other seminal writers and artists; and how literary works reflect and evoke their imaginative and prophetic propositions. In the first term we will be concentrating on Marshall McLuhan. Our primary text will be The Book of Probes. We will be examining his most influential and well-known aphorisms, his tetrads, and the essential explorations he made into the media realm. In McLuhan s final works he wrote or dictated (most of his last books were collaborations, often conducted through conversation and discussion, with colleagues) in aphorisms, elliptical epigrams, fragments, mixed modes, all what he chose to call probes. McLuhan was searching for laws, or codes, that operated through the effects of the electronic media. He saw electronic media as a new text of nature a second creation. His work in these stages took on poetic density and allusiveness. Can he be understood, then, as the first great poet-theorist of media? The so-called media guru, however, began as a literary person, studying the Renaissance trivium and quadrivium at Cambridge, under F.R. Leavis and I.A. Richards; and continued his literary studies as a professor of Symbolist Literature in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. His first published works were essays on James Joyce, G.K. Chesterton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Wyndham Lewis. How did a thinker steeped in the traditions of western literature become the avatar of the electronic cosmos, and the patron saint of the magazine called Wired? His non-systematic approaches anticipate post-modern and contemporary discourse. He denied he had a theory, calling his work ground and percept.

7 We will examine McLuhan s terminology and articulations, in his attempt to frame an understanding of the new circumstances that electricity and its technologies television, radio, computers brought to people. We will focus on his last powerful utterances and their prophetic attempts to awaken media users. The second term is devoted to examining the works of Northrop Frye. His studies and literary publications began in the work of William Blake, in the canon-changing book, Fearful Symmetry. In that work Frye begins to approach the concept that there could be a deep underlying structure to all of literature. We will explore how spiritual knowledge burst through to him, so he argued, in his final works, beginning especially with The Great Code. Frye sought unity behind chaos, and attempted to present to his readers a new system of thought and awareness through a radical revision of what we mean by text. Frye thought cosmos could be comprehended through the code buried inside the metaphors of certain great works, primarily The Bible. Thus we will be concentrating on The Great Code, with examinations of his more synoptic works, The Educated Imagination and his last major essay, The Double Vision. We will also be looking at fragments from his late Notebooks. In these works the literary critic and theorist the author of Anatomy of Criticism enlarged his vision to encompass theology. He became a visionary contrarian highly controversial in his understanding of The Bible, and his presentation of counterhistory and the nature of mythic consciousness. We will examine their conflicting rhetorical strategies: McLuhan, the wily prankster and punster, the prophet of new media and the subliminal environments of electricity; Frye, the seemingly detached scholar, whose heretical thinking and sublime visionary intentions were often masked in a careful prose.

8 Both must be regarded as much more than critics; they were creators of new imaginative and perceptive methodologies. Moreover, these two Canadians knew one another, and often debated the other through their writings, sometimes expressing vehement disagreements. What were these disagreements? What are their areas of harmony? Both began as academic literary critics and ended up becoming influential beyond academia. Both were fascinated by popular culture and by extra-literary expressions. Both were visionaries, seeking the pattern behind the patterns, who shrouded their errant quests, often erratic one in the masks of satire, and the other in the nuanced arguments of theory. McLuhan and Frye have had their periods when they were highly valued, then their periods when they were dismissed or disavowed by literary establishments. Both were obsessed with the meaning of the word, apocalypse. What do their visions, their provocations, their observations, their pursuits of codes and laws have to say to us now?

9 Course Format: Three-hour seminar. Introductory lectures with student engagement through discussion, debate, readings, interpretation. Course Requirements: *One short essays on a McLuhan s aphorism. For example: What is the meaning of the aphorism, The Medium is the Message? (10%) A second longer essay; subject matter to be discussed through the term. (20%) **One long research essay on Northrop Frye, subject matter possibly covering questions, What is the great code of literature? And, what is the double vision? What is counterhistory? (30%) ***Class-group presentation at end of second term: McLuhan and Frye, The Debate that Never Took Place. One group to present the McLuhan side; one group to present the Frye side. Subject matter: Electronic Screen versus Printed Page. (10%) ****Final Examination in April exam period. The exam will look at both McLuhan and Frye, and their ideas, as we discussed them through the term. Exam format to be decided in class discussions (20%) *****Class Participation and Attendance, Preparation for Readings and Discussions, Oral Skills and Engagements with Class Debates, Originality of Research and Readings in Class. (10%)

10 Marshall McLuhan Essential Ideas 1. The medium is the message. The accompanying aphorism is User is content though it isn t as well known as the above: user is content possibly more relevant in time of internet? Variation: The Medium is the Massage. 2. Aphorism vs. fragment. 3. Probe and percept versus theory and concept. 4. Figure/Ground. The interplay of visible and invisible factors, forces, elements: sometimes identified as the interplay between what is obvious and what is subliminal. Examples: if the figure is a printed book, what is the ground?...the printing press; the literacy of the reader; the alphabet itself; the effect of the alphabet on consciousness and sensibility; slowness of visual decoding. There can be multiple interacting grounds to an obvious figure. If the figure is the computer, what is the ground?... Electricity; speed light; digitization (can contain the alphabet, but in a new stage of numerical literacy); the home workstation networked with global web; virtual space. 5. Tetrads: see course outline and handout. 6. Preliterate, post-literate. 7. Paradigm. And: Paradigm Shift. 8. Galaxy (field). 9. Vortex. 10. Right-brain/ fourth world. 11. Sensorium: the balance of the senses. Gestalt. 12. Rhetoric: the study of effects. Hot/cool: information can be concentrated, dense, and maximal (a book), paradoxically demanding less.

11 Northrop Frye Essential Ideas 1. The Educated Imagination: imagination as mediator between spirit and matter The role of education in shaping energy and spirit. 2. The Great Code of Art what is it? Analogical structure of The Bible in western literature. 3. The Bush Garden (the Garrison Mentality) concept of Canada. 4. The Double Vision (from William Blake): seeing many possibilities at once: fourfold vision 5. Myth the vehicle of kerygma. Kerygma a mode of rhetoric, a mixture of the metaphorical and the existential 6. The Bible as Mythic Fiction, not as History difference between fact/history and Mythic Time, imaginative time. (Part of the Double Vision.) 7. Role of theory to establish coherence, cohesion, connection theory as magic key to dreamland that is literature. How does Frye s notion of theory differ from McLuhan s and from Derrida s? Frye s concept of theory as contemplation. 8. The Critic as Artist, phrase taken from Oscar Wilde-- implications of the critic as one who recreates. 9. The Necessity of Influence. Art is made out of other works of art. The artist does not consult nature, he or she consults other works of art. Art is an enclosed mythological structure which rebels against the limitations imposed by reality and fact. Art is counter-historical. 10. Frye as advocate of radical force of imagination: the liberal vision is multiple, therefore any political system that imposes single vision is tyranny. (John Stuart Mill welded on to William Blake.) 11. Multilevel interpretation: literal, moral, allegoric, symbolic.

12 12. Frye s process: from Blake, and recognition of double vision (existential and metaphoric, at once, innocence and experience form simultaneous vision); to expression of critical theory that will help to create a key to understanding literature, where the double vision can be found more coherently than any other art; expansion of critical theory to embrace the imaginative structure of The Bible in The Great Code; expansion of the Great Code to Words of Power.

13 Schedule of Discussions and Readings Students should keep in mind that there must be flexibility here, due to the short term, and the demanding nature of our primary texts. Discussions may go longer than planned Fall Term: Marshall McLuhan Thursday September 8 th Introduction. Background Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye: Modernism and Post-Modernist legacies. Thursday September 15 th Essay: A Historical Approach to the Media (handout) What is an aphorism? The Medium is the Massage. The Book of Probes Thursday September 22 nd The Book of Probes continued. The medium is the message excerpt from Understanding Media (handout) The Medium is the Massage: an exploration of the pun in Massage the Global City and Theatre.

14 Thursday September 29 th Thursday October 6th The Book of Probes, continued Themes: probe, figure/ground, light through/light on, Breakdown leads to breakthrough Electricity as Ground; gestalt; fragment and satire Essay: Pound, Eliot, and the Rhetoric of The Waste Land (handout) T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, both versions: 1920 and 1922 canonic edited by Ezra Pound (original version available on line: goo.gl/9ydm1/z) Thursday October 13 th McLuhan, Eliot, and Pound: the triv and quad (The Waste Land continued) Field-mosaic and POV Definitions of Satire: percept versus concept Thursday October 20 th The Book of Probes continued Environment to anti-environment (handout) Global Village/Global Theatre Thursday October 27 th Reading Days; no classes

15 Thursday November 3 rd Notes on Burroughs (handout) Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs Anti-Environment, Power, Addiction, Extension Thursday November 10 th The Book of Probes (continued) Naked Lunch (continued) Thursday November 17th The visionary McLuhan: Evolution in Hyper-drive Seeing into the present, writing the future New forms of consciousness: awareness intensified in Media conditions; perception heighted; the global mind New environments create new forms of awareness Texts: Virginia Woolf s The Waves Two pages from James Joyce s Finnegans Wake (first page, last page) Thursday November 24 th Media Ecology: evolution of McLuhan s thought The Book of Probes (continued) Tetrads: methodologies of perception; exploration of pop culture: User is Content and Star Wars as audience event Thursday December 1 st Media Ecology (continued) John Cage, Silence, essays on Nothing and Something DEW line (distant early warning)

16 Perception and experience over theory and concept Monday December 5 th Classes end; fall term concludes 2017 Winter Term: Northrop Frye Thursday January 5 th Northrop Frye: The Critic as Magus What is the Educated Imagination? Text: The Educated Imagination Thursday January 12th The Educated Imagination continued. The imagination as portal to past, present, future Imagination altering reality The Identity Code: Who are you? Thursday January 19 th Journey to the East, Hermann Hesse The inward domain as liberation story Quest, the great work, the one great book Thursday January 26 th The Great Code: The Bible as Literature Counter history and myth Text as apocalyptic point The great code narrative: Genesis, Exodus, Law, Wisdom, Prophecy, Mission, Revelation

17 Thursday February 2nd Thursday February 9 th The Great Code (continued) Reading myth, allegory, symbol, image T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922 canonic version) The Great Code (continued) Anne Carson, The Anthropology of Water, in Plainwater. Irony, evasion, the quest reinvented, reading myth in Post-Modern conditions Thursday February 16 th The Great Code (continued) The allegoric narrative in art, films Star Wars as demonstration of the great code at work Monday February 20 th Friday February 24 th : Reading Week Thursday March 2 nd The Double Vision Perceiving and comprehending on many levels at once McLuhan, Frye: Making, not Matching Role of poetics in instilling vision Thursday March 9 th Frye and Blake: The Double Vision continued William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience Imagination, material reality together

18 Thursday March 16 th The Double Vision continued Frye s theological concerns and liberation philosophy Thursday March 23 rd Course review: McLuhan and Frye, point-counterpoint Thursday March 30 th The Great Debate: Electronic Screen and the Global Theatre versus The Printed Word and the Centrality of The Book The Public Debate McLuhan and Frye Never Had Wednesday April 5 th classes end April 7 th -24 rd Examination Period *****Final Examination on both McLuhan and Frye in the April Examination Period. This examination will be in the standard threehour format. The date, hour and place to be arranged. Format and style of the exam to be shaped in class discussion. Spring term ends on April 28 th, 2017 B.W. Powe

Fall/Winter

AP/EN 4170 6.0A Couse Director: Delivery Format: Fall/Winter 2014-2015 Modernism/Postmodernism Bruce Powe bpowe@yorku.ca Seminar Time: T 4:00-7:00 Description: Category: Area: Period: Requirements: Reading