ABSTRACT
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.
