Marshall McLuhan was the visionary theorist best known for coining the phrase “the medium is the message.” His work prefigures and underlies the themes of writers and artists as disparate and essential as Andy Warhol, Nam June Paik, Neil Postman, Seth Godin, Barbara Kruger, and Douglas Rushkoff, among countless others. Shortly before his death, together with his media scholar son Eric, McLuhan worked on a new literary/visual code–almost a cross between hieroglyphics and poetry–that he called “the tetrads.” This was the ultimate theoretical framework for analyzing any new medium, a koan-like poetics that transcends traditional means of discourse. Some of the tetrads were published, but only a few. Now Eric McLuhan has recovered all the “lost” tetrads that he and his father developed, and accompanies them here with accessible explanations of how they function.

What do we think of when we think of literary critics? Enlightenment snobs in powdered wigs? Professional experts? Cloistered academics? Through the end of the 20th century, book review columns and literary magazines held onto an evolving but stable critical paradigm, premised on expertise, objectivity, and carefully measured response. And then the Internet happened. From the editors of Review 31 and 3:AM Magazine, The Digital Critic brings together a diverse group of perspectives—early-adopters, Internet skeptics, bloggers, novelists, editors, and others—to address the future of literature and scholarship in a world of Facebook likes, Twitter wars, and Amazon book reviews. It takes stock of the so-called Literary Internet up to the present moment, and considers the future of criticism: its promise, its threats of decline, and its mutation, perhaps, into something else entirely. With contributions from Robert Barry, Russell Bennetts, Michael Bhaskar, Louis Bury, Lauren Elkin, Scott Esposito, Marc Farrant, Orit Gat, Thea Hawlin, Ellen Jones, Anna Kiernan, Luke Neima, Will Self, Jonathon Sturgeon, Sara Veale, Laura Waddell, and Joanna Walsh.

An Italian philosopher, psychologist and robotics engineer, Manzotti presents an alternative and ecological hypothesis about how consciousness exists in the real world.

Digination offers an inter-disciplinary, broad overview of the psychic, social, and institutional effects of some of the most popular digital communication technologies and applications operating today. Written in an engaging style appropriate for non-specialist readers interested in broadening their awareness and enhancing their understanding of popular trends in media use.

Originally published: Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

This groundbreaking book uses observations made by Marshall McLuhan to analyze the aesthetics of science fiction films, treating them as visual metaphors or probes into the new reality dominated by electronic media: - it considers the relations between the senses and sensuality in Blade Runner, the visually-tactile character of the film, and the status of replicants as humanity’s new clothes; - it analyzes the mixture of Eastern and Western aesthetics in Star Wars, analyzing Darth Vader as a combination of the literate and the tribal mindset; - it discusses the failure of visual society presented in the Terminator and Alien franchises, the rekindling of horror vacui, tribalism, and the desire to obliterate the past as a result of the simultaneity of the acoustic space; - finally, the book discusses the Matrix trilogy and Avatar as being deeply related in terms of the growing importance of tactility, easternization, tribalization, as well as connectivity and the implosion of human civilization.

This book corrects an imbalance in Canadian political literature through offering a conservative account of Canadian political thought. Across 15 chronologically organized chapters, and with a mixture of established and rising scholars, the book offers an investigation of the defining features and characteristics of Canadian conservative political thought, asking what have Canadian conservative political thinkers and practitioners learned from other traditions and, in turn, what have they contributed to our understanding of conservative political thought today? Rather than its culmination, Canadian Conservative Political Thought will be the beginning of conservative political thought’s recovery and will spark debates and future research. The book will be a great resource for courses on Canadian politics, history, political philosophy and conservatism, Canadian Studies, and political theory.