In 1914, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound—the founders of vorticism—undertook an unprecedented analysis of the present, its technologies, communication, politics, and architecture. The essays in Counterblasting Canada trace the influence of vorticism on Marshall McLuhan and Canadian Modernism. Building on the initial accomplishment of the magazine Blast, McLuhan’s subsequent Counterblast, and the network of artistic and intellectual relationships that flourished in Canadian vorticism, the contributors offer groundbreaking examinations of postwar Canadian literary culture, particularly the legacies of Sheila and Wilfred Watson. Intended primarily for scholars of literature and communications, Counterblasting Canada explores a crucial and long-overlooked strand in Canadian cultural and literary history. Contributors: Gregory Betts, Adam Hammond, Paul Hjartarson, Dean Irvine, Elena Lamberti, Philip Monk, Linda M. Morra, Kristine Smitka, Leon Surette, Paul Tiessen, Adam Welch, Darren Wershler.
Blast Counterblast is a multifaceted, fascinating examination of the way intellectuals interact--through influence, through argumentation, and through criticism. Looking at both Wyndham Lewis's modernist publication BLAST and Marshall McLuhan's 1969 response to it, COUNTERBLAST, the contributors to this volume--a selection of writers, visual artists, performers, and filmmakers--skewer relational aesthetics and identity politics in order to restate what the role of identity formation is today. Taking McLuhan and Lewis as starting points, the essays in this volume develop and push the ideas presented in both BLAST and COUNTERBLAST while the book design pays homage to both thinkers' experiments in typography. Blast Counterblast includes the writings of Maria Fusco, Michael Hoolboom, My Barbarian, Lane Relyea, and Ryan Trecartin.
In the same year that Wyndham Lewis published Self Condemned, Marshall McLuhan took inspiration from Lewiss journal BLAST and produced COUNTERBLAST, intended, like Self Condemned, to shake the city of Toronto out of its smugness, complacency, and spiritu
Digital Modernism examines how and why some of the most innovative works of online electronic literature adapt and allude to literary modernism. Digital literature has been celebrated as a postmodern form that grows out of contemporary technologies, subjectivities, and aesthetics, but this book provides an alternative genealogy. Exemplary cases show electronic literature looking back to modernism for inspiration and source material (in content, form, and ideology) through which to critique contemporary culture. In so doing, this literature renews and reframes, rather than rejects, a literary tradition that it also reconfigures to center around media. To support her argument, Pressman pairs modernist works by Pound, Joyce, and Bob Brown, with major digital works like William Poundstone's "Project for the Tachistoscope: [Bottomless Pit]" (2005), Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries's Dakota, and Judd Morrissey's The Jew's Daughter. With each pairing, she demonstrates how the modernist movement of the 1920s and 1930s laid the groundwork for the innovations of electronic literature. In sum, the study situates contemporary digital literature in a literary genealogy in ways that rewrite literary history and reflect back on literature's past, modernism in particular, to illuminate the crucial role that media played in shaping the ambitions and practices of that period.
Liberature – coined from the Latin liber – is simultaneously a movement in contemporary Polish literature, and a term referring to literary works that integrate text and material features of the book into an organic whole in accordance with the author’s design. The present volume collects essays inspired by this theoretical concept, first proposed by Polish poet Zenon Fajfer in 1999, but soon picked up and elaborated on by international scholars. As noted by the contributing authors, preceding Jessica Pressman’s idea of “bookishness” and coinciding with N. Katherine Hayles’ fundamental writings, liberature appeared at the end of the 20th century, “as if to resume and systematize the intuitions and provocative statements” of writers concerned with the future of the book. It fits into a wider turn towards the recognition of the embodied nature of information in anthropology, literary, textual, media and AI studies. Yet its distinctness consists in the fact that it was suggested by a creative writer, and that it proposes to see the authorially-shaped materiality of writing in terms of a literary genre. The essays collected here present the modernist roots and inspirations of liberature, address the semantics of typography and the question of materiality of literary writing, and explore how the “abstract body of the printed book is transformed into an experience of embodiment.” The volume is completed with a reprint of Fajfer’s seminal essays with a view to making them more available to English-speaking readers.
Winner of the Business Book Award (Personal Development) 2020 "Using our Physical Intelligence we can strengthen our cognitive function and alter our mood, emotional responses, stress, confidence and happiness levels at will." HR magazine "This could be the next big thing." Talking Business with Aaron Heslehurst, BBC World News "This clever new neuroscience-backed wellness trend will help you take charge of your body, brain, schedule and life." GLAMOUR MAGAZINE "'Physical intelligence' is the latest buzzword in wellbeing.' WOMAN & HOME The highly successful four-part strategy for raising your performance at work and home so that you can thrive in a busy, challenging world, from the experts who have worked with Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies across the globe. Do you wish you could be more focused and productive? Would you like to ensure your most confident performance when the stakes are high and your stress levels are even higher? The way your body reacts in any given situation determines your ability to think clearly and your capacity for managing your emotions. When you understand the way your body reacts and how to manage it, your physical intelligence, you can handle that stressful family situation, the make-or-break meeting and the important business presentation. Claire Dale and Patricia Peyton have spent the past thirty years helping business people achieve outstanding success and a deeper sense of fulfilment by applying techniques used by top performers in sport and the arts. This practical guide contains the effective techniques you need to develop your strength, flexibility, resilience and endurance, leaving you feeling confident and fully equipped to deal with whatever comes your way. Each step-by-step strategy can be easily integrated into a busy day and is combined with useful tips and inspiring stories of people who have turned their lives around through physical intelligence. "This book is an essential counterblast to a better, more integrated way of working and living." Edward Kemp, Director, Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) "Scientific research paired with practical experience and easy life hacks makes Physical Intelligence an inspiring read that will literally change the way you walk through life." Dr Stefanie Teichmann, Director, Google EMEA "This book is totally brilliant." Wayne McGregor CBE, resident choreographer, Royal Ballet
Surveys the life and career of the social theorist best known for the quotation, "The medium is the message, " who helped shape the culture of the 1960s and predicted the future of television and the rise of the Internet.
Our conception of logical space is the set of distinctions we use to navigate the world. Agustín Rayo argues that this is shaped by acceptance or rejection of 'just is'-statements: e.g. 'to be composed of water just is to be composed of H2O'. He offers a novel conception of metaphysical possibility, and a new trivialist philosophy of mathematics.
An investigation of Sachs’s schizophrenic career, and the worldwide havoc he has caused. Jeffrey Sachs is a man with many faces. A celebrated economist and special advisor to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, he is also no stranger to the world of celebrity, accompanying Bono, Madonna and Angelina Jolie on high-profile trips to Africa. Once notorious as the progenitor of a brutal form of free market engineering called ‘shock therapy’, Sachs now positions himself as a voice of progressivism, condemning the ‘1 per cent’ and promoting his solution to extreme poverty through the Millennium Villages Project. Appearances can be deceiving. Jeffrey Sachs: The Strange Case of Dr Shock and Mr Aid is the story of an evangelical development expert who poses as saviour of the Third World while opening vulnerable nations to economic exploitation. Based on documentary research and on-the-ground investigation, Jeffrey Sachs exposes Mr Aid as no more than a new, more human face of Dr Shock.
