MediaTropes Volume 1, Number 1
Coming in February 2007
Table of Contents | Editors’ Column | About the Authors
Table of Contents
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Introduction
by Twyla Gibson
Title
by W.J.T. Mitchell
“Agents of Aggressive Order”: Letters, Hands, and the Grasping Power of Teeth in the Early Canadian Torture Narrative
by Monique Tschofen
Fleshworks and the Art of Torture: The Body as a Medium
response to Tschofen by Carolyn Guertin
Is the Medium the Message in Psychoanalysis?
by Donald L. Carveth
Psychoanalysis, Symbolization, and McLuhan
response to Carveth by Stuart J. Murray
The Medium is the Sign: Was McLuhan a Semiotician?
by Marcel Danesi
Title
response to Danesi by Sibylle Moser
Music, McLuhan, Modality: Musical Experience From “Extreme Occasion” to “Alchemy”
by Deanne Bogdan
Title
reponse to Bogdan by Michael Edmunds
Teaching McLuhan
by Mark Lipton
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Editorial Board
· Giselle Beiguelman, Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, Brazil
· Michael Joyce, Vassar College
· Janet Murray, Georgia Institute of Technology
· Donald Theall, Trent University
· Gregory Ulmer, University of Florida
Advisory Board
· Megan Boler, OISE, University of Toronto
· Mary Bryson, University of British Columbia
· Bradley Bryan, University of Victoria
· Sarah K. Burgess, University of San Francisco
· Nina Czegledy, Artist, Toronto
· Gary Genosko, Lakehead University
· Michael Groden, University of Western Ontario
· Diane Gromala, Simon Fraser University
· Natasha Hurley, Rutgers University
· Mark Lipton, University of Guelph-Humber
· Janine Marchessault, York University
· Talan Memmott, California State University, Monterey Bay
· Gail Scott, Author, Concordia University
· Margaret Toye, Wilfrid Laurier University
· Monique Tschofen, Ryerson University
· Maximiliaan von Woudenberg, Sheridan College
About MediaTropes
Taking its inspiration from the legacy of Marshall McLuhan and the Toronto School of Communication, MediaTropes is a transdisciplinary, peer-reviewed e-journal that seeks to breach boundaries, existing as a vigorous border hopper--alien in new cultural territories. It interrogates all frameworks, structures, and media, revealing the hidden ground of their effects. Included within this is not just a questioning of media themselves, but an examination of how information instantiated in media transforms and is transformed by their socio-cultural milieux.
A trope is a rhetorical figure; it is a turn, a turn of phrase, a manner of speaking. More generally, a trope is a mode of communication, the form that communication takes. As an e-journal, MediaTropes explores the ways that media of all kinds communicate, examining the hidden ground of mediated effects. McLuhan's famous aphorism, "the medium is the message," encourages us to examine what media do , not just what they say.
In this regard, all media, every technological extension of the human, are tropic. The metaphor, for instance, is literally a "carrying across," indicating movement and transformation. It is for this reason that McLuhan writes, "All words, in every language, are metaphors." Communication is not reducible to information exchange, but takes place in vital language that is irreducible to zeroes and ones.
MediaTropes invites the submission of new critical approaches, multimedia works, scholarly articles, and book reviews addressing the wide range of work that media theories have inspired. This includes, but is not limited to, disciplinary and transdisciplinary studies of:
- Marshall McLuhan and his legacy
- New media technologies
- Technoculture
- Art, technology, and machine aesthetics
- The posthuman
- Digitality and the virtual
- Cyberspace and cybercultures
- Television, Internet, and technopopular cultures
- Theories, rhetorics, and semiotics
- Literacies and post-literate cultures
- Communications studies, communications arts
- Media ecology
- Connectivity
- The social, political, and historical valences of media
- Codeworks, net.art, and web.art
- Activism and hacktivism
- Cosmopolitanism and globalism
- Emerging and Experimental Digital Genres
Email us: mediatropes@utoronto.ca