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.

GREGORY BETTS is a poet, editor, essayist and teacher, originally from Vancouver and Toronto. Since his first published poem, an anagrammatical translation of a short poem by bpNichol, Betts's work has consistently troubled individual authorship through such mechanisms as anagrams, collaboration, found-texts and response-text writing. If Language presents paragraph-length anagrams that explore the formation of meaning within a recombinant linguistic system. Haikube was part of a collaborative art project with sculptors Matt Donovan and Hallie Siegel in which six of Betts's poems were carved into an ebony movable (a la Rubiks) cube. The text was carved in negative relief, which allowed the cube to function as a press block to print new poems as they were 'discovered' by moving the sides of the cube. Betts currently lives in St. Catharines, where he edits PRECIPICe magazine, curates the Grey Borders Reading Series and teaches Avant-Garde and Canadian Literature at Brock University.

Gregory Betts' profile page

Paul Hjartarson is Professor Emeritus in English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, where he leads the Editing Modernism in Canada research group. His scholarly work is on life-writing, Canadian literature, modernism, print culture and the digital humanities. His most recent book, co-authored with Shirley Neuman, is The Thinking Heart: The Literary Archive of Wilfred Watson (2014). Until his retirement, Paul Hjartarson was a Professor of English at the University of Alberta and has published on both Baroness Elsa and Frederick Philip Grove.

Paul Hjartarson's profile page

Kristine Smitka teaches in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. To better understand the relationship between print and digital forms of publishing, her research focuses on the paperback book as a medium that defies the old vs. new media binary. She lives in Edmonton.

Kristine Smitka's profile page

"Reading Counterblasting Canada one has the impression that this quartet—Lewis, McLuhan, and Wilfred and Sheila Watson—and their thinking about culture touched just about every discipline and genre available in the mid to late twentieth century…. Finally, then, these collections not only open up new critical conversations about Watson and others, they remind us that our provocative predecessors are also mentors who might help us reimagine the liberal arts in the neo-liberal university." [Full review at http://www.thebullcalfreview.ca/sheilawatson.htm]

The Bull Calf, 6.2

"[The essays] coincide and illuminate a narrative attentive to modernist and postmodernist discourses, patterns of influence, media theory, and the future of the humanities more generally.... While every essay is rich in theory and critical reflection, it is witnessing career- and life-altering conversations unfold on every page of this book that is sometimes most engrossing. Those conversations are made all the more impressive by the archival research peppered throughout.... The model of influence presented in Counterblasting Canada is compelling because it is partly a site of conflict.... Counterblasting Canada will have obvious appeal to communications, media studies, or Canadian literature scholars (especially those interested in the recent conversationsabout later modernism, intermodernism, and the like..." Canadian Literature 232 (Spring 2017) [Full review at http://canlit.ca/article/collaborations-and-collisions-in-the-canadian-vortex]

Jeffrey Aaron Weingarten