Donald Theall explores and explains the significance of the emergence of McLuhan as an important figure in North America in the development of an understanding of culture, communication, and technology. He reveals important information about McLuhan and his relationships with his earliest collaborator and life-long friend, anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, as well as with Theall himself, McLuhan's first doctoral student. McLuhan emerges as a complex human being, at once attractive, witty, egotistic, and exasperating. Theall examines McLuhan's many roles - proponent of a poetic method; pop guru adopted by Tom Wolfe, Woody Allen and others; North American precursor of French theory (Baudrillard, Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze); artist; and shaman. Complex and intellectual, neither uncritical adulation nor demonization, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan does justice to a unique figure caught in a struggle between tradition and modernity, between faith and anarchy.

Product Description: James Joyce's Techno-Poetics is on the cutting edge of an original and exciting new trend in Joycean studies, as it combines the study of literature, technology, and communication to reveal James Joyce as 'a key figure in the history of cyberculture...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Theall (emeritus, Trent U., Canada) centers his discussion around the theoretical implications of the work of James Joyce who he posits as a poetical engineer whose works show how poetry and art have always provided society with a means of communication about social and technological change...read more