Articles

 

Refereed Publications

Journals | Media Interviews | Conference Proceedings | Other

(a) Journals

  • “Kittler’s Apophrades: Marshaling McLuhan,” Berlin Journal of Critical Theory 3 (2022) 5-32 
  • * “Dematerialization and Rematerialization: Mediatic Flipflop and the Anthropocene,” The Berlin Journal of Critical Theory 1 (2019): 83-97
  •  “McLuhan: Technology: Being,” Pan: Philosophy Activism Nature—A Journal in the Environmental Humanities [Melbourne] 12 (2016): 17-22
  • “On the 50th Anniversary of Understanding Media,” for the Journal of Visual Culture 13.1 (2014) 33-35 [50th Anniversary issue, Understanding Media]
  •  “Re-Mediating the Medium,” in Site [Stockholm] 33 (2013): 186-196.
  • “McLuhan and the Humanities,” commissioned by English Studies in Canada [special issue for McLuhan centennial] 36:2-3 (2010):14-18.
  • “McLuhan, Glocalism, and Canadian Literature,” in Prime: International Peace Research Institute [Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo] 27 (2008): 123-130.
  • “Geographical Immediations: Locating The English Patient,” New Formations 57 [The Spatial Imaginary] (2005): 95-106.
  • “Architectural Memory and Acoustic Space,” Architecture in Canada 28.1 (2003): 7-18.
  • “Here is Where Now,” Essays on Canadian Writing 71 (2000): 195-202.
  • “Typing Tay John,English Studies in Canada [Special Issue on the History of the Book] 25:3/4 (1999): 347-367.
  • “Material Querelle: The Case of Frye and McLuhan,” for Essays on Canadian Writing 68 (2000): 238-261 (Special issue on Materialist Critique).
  • “McLuhan and Spatial Communication,” Western Journal of Communication 63.3 (1999): 348-363 (Special Issue on Communication and Space).
  • “Felix Paul Greve, The Eulenburg Scandal, and Frederick Philip Grove,” Essays on Canadian Writing 62 (1998):12-45 [Special Issue on Paraliterary Scandals in Canada].
  • (with Peter Dickinson), “Bucke, Whitman, and the Cross-Border Homo-social,” Canadian Review of American Studies / American Review of Canadian Studies 26.3 (1996) (Special Joint Issue on “Canadian / American Relations: The Meaning of Differences”): 425-448; awarded the North Eastern Modern Language Association Essay Prize (April 1995).
  • “The Race of Space,” New Formations 31 (Spring/Summer 1997): 39-50.
  • “White Technologies,” Essays on Canadian Writing 59 (Fall 1996; Special Issue on “Representing North”): 199-210.
  • “‘Same Difference’: On the Hegemony of ‘Language’ and ‘Literature’ in Comparative Studies,” The Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 23.1 (1996): 27-34.
  • “Where is Frye? Or, Theorizing Postcolonial Space,” Essays on Canadian Writing 56 (1995): 110-134.
  • “Theorizing Canadian Space: Postcolonial Articulations,” Canada: Theoretical Discourse /Discours théoriques, eds. T. Goldie, C. Lambert, R. Lorimer (Montréal: Association for Canadian Studies, 1994): 75-104.
  • “Representing Writing: The Emblem as (Hiero)Glyph,” in The European Emblem: Selected Papers from the Glasgow Conference, ed. Bernard F. Scholz, Michael Bath and David Weston (Leiden: Brill, 1990): 167-190.
  • “‘The Nth Adam’: Dante in Klein’s The Second Scroll,” Canadian Literature 106 (1985): 45-53.
  • “‘Et in Acadia Ego’: An Integrative Approach to Canadian Literature,” Spicilegio Moderno [U Bologna] 17/18 (1982): 12-18.
  • “The Unspoken in Sinclair Ross’s As for Me and My House,” Spicilegio Moderno [U Bologna] 14 (1980): 23-30.

(b) Media Interviews

  • Interview with Shruti Shekar, on 4K TV, The Wire Report, thewirereport.ca, 1 October 2014
  • Interview with Jessica Werb for UBC News on the shift from time to space in TV programming (Sept. 2014)
  • Live radio interview with Shere-E Punjabi radio 1550 AM #1 South Asian News re TV on the internet (Sept. 2014)
  • Interview with cbc.ca (online) re CRTC commission rulings re pay-per-view and Netflix (Oct. 2014)
  • Interview with Katherine Feng, NTD Television Vancouver (ntdtv.com) re the Hong Kong protests (Oct. 2014)
  • Interview with The Source Television network on the CRTC decisions re pay-per-view and Netflix (Oct. 2014)
  • Interview with Juice FM (Nelson) re CRTC (Oct. 2014)
  • Interview with Ira Nadel for “Arts on the Air,” CITR Radio (UBC), on UBC’s Bachelor in Media Studies Progeram (recorded 16 January 2014)
  • Interview with Marsha Lederman for “A Thinky superstar for a distracted era: author and innovator Douglas Coupland has become Canada’s go-to guy for art, design, and contemporary social commentary,” The Globe and Mail (Saturday 12 October 2013) R8: “’Look at how many chairs he’s able to occupy successfully,’ says Richard Cavell, an English professor at the University of British Columbia, who teaches Coupland to his students: ‘He’s a thinker. He’s a novelist. He’s a screenwriter. He’s an artist. He’s a designer. He’s a landscape designer. He’s a sculptor.’”
  • Interview with Sarah Scott, “Mr. Concept: Iain Baxter& is Discovered and Re-Discovered,” Canadian Art 29.1 (Spring 2012): 92-99 :  “It took other intellectuals to bring BAXTER& back to life. In 2002, Richard Cavell, an English professor at the University of British Columbia, published McLuhan in Space. After a couple of decades in the intellectual hinterland, Marshall McLuhan was hot again; with the arrival of the Internet, his theories finally made sense. For the cover, Cavell said, the choice was obvious: it could only be IAIN BAXTER&, because his art expresses some of the profound thoughts of one of the great intellectuals of our time. … The picture on the cover of his McLuhan in Space, …  [Baxter&’s] Urban Landscape (1980), features a landscape in which a huge blue sky is strewn with puffy clouds. “[Baxter&] is trying to remind us that we’re viewing the world through the medium [of photography]” (96-7).
  • “The Politics of Media,” Interview by Maja Skovran, Programme Editor, Serbian Broadcasting Corporation, 27 March 2012
  • “Media Today,” Interview with Branko Vasic, Radio Belgrade 202, 27 March 2012
  • “McLuhan and Media,” Interview with Valentina Delic, MediaCenter Sarajevo, 27 March 2012 [netnovinar.org]
  • “Media Today,” Interview with Vladimir Matkovic, Danas [newspaper], Belgrade, 27 March 2012
  • Series of interviews, Clio Publications, Belgrade Serbia, 27 March 2012
  • “Die Magie der Medien: McLuhan’s Botschaft,” interview by Ina Zwerger with Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF: Austrian National Radio), broadcast on July 18, 19, 20 and 21, 2011
  • “Neue und alte Medien: Der McLuhan-Experte und Medienwissenschaftler Richard Cavell war im Sommersemester als kanadischer Gastprofessor am Englischen Seminar,” by Eva-Maria Karpf, Unizeit: Nachrichten und Berichte aus der Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel (No. 67), 16 July 2011, 4.
  • “McLuhan and the Body as Medium,” YouTube, “Dr. Richard Cavell at the UBC Center for Cross Faculty Inquiry, March 5, 2009,” 9 mins. 43 secs.
  • FACT Gallery (Liverpool) TV: “McLuhan and the Body as Medium” (www.fact.tv/channels)
  • Rob McKee, BBN3 News / SoMedia, “Canadian Multiculturalism,” for broadcast on CHEK-TV on 1 July 2010
  • Amy Minsky, “Internet beats TV for Screen Time,” The Vancouver Sun / CanWestGlobal, Monday 7 June 2010, B6: “Some people have less faith in the tenacity of the television. ‘It’s over,’ said Richard Cavell, an English professor at the University of British Columbia. ‘There is no TV any more, because it has become the internet.’ Cavell, who researches media, technology and television, pointed to an American study that found television usage per capita is increasing by several hours a year. ‘But what that statistic doesn’t tell you, is that the increase in TV usage was on the internet, as people download and stream shows online.’”
  • Michael Valpy, “Vancouver’s ban on outdoor smoking: the real payoff,” The Globe and Mail, Saturday 24 April 2010, F3: “This week, Vancouver legislated a smoking ban in its parks and on its public beaches, entering what health ethicists call the zone of uncertainty of no-threshold harm, where there is no acceptable level of exposure to cigarette smoke for anyone. To UBC English professor Richard Cavell, decisions by Vancouver and other West Coast communities to push smoking bans outdoors is a legitimate expression of cultural ethos because the mild climate creates an aesthetic of indoors and outdoors being one big room. ‘West Coast architecture bears this out,’ he says. ‘The extensive use of glass breaks down any sense of inside versus outside.’”
  • Richard Cavell, “The Medium is still the message, if a convoluted one,” The Vancouver Sun (Saturday 3 April, 2010) D2 [Faculty of Arts column]
  • Michael Posner, “Helen Weinzweig: she turned personal pain into beautiful prose,” The Globe and Mail (24 February 2010) S9: “UBC English professor Richard Cavell called Basic Black [with Pearls] ‘a novel about the loss of cultural memory. [It’s] devastating both on the personal level [a woman searching for identity] and on the allegorical one of a nation [Canada] that has wilfully forgotten what it is.’”
  • “Major endowment for UBC made in honour of Canadian author Jane Rule,” by Denise Ryan, The Vancouver Sun, 6 June 2009, A4: “UBC English Prof. Richard Cavell [stated], ‘The topic of human sexuality extends right across the entire university, arts, social sciences, art. … I am just staggered by the generosity and foresight of this donor. … It is a major donation to the faculty of arts; human culture is fundamental to everything we do on campus.’”
  • “Federal Budget Cuts to Arts Organizations,” interview with Chris England (6 Nov. 2008) for radio station 107.9 (BCIT), airing January 2009
  • “UBC to host largest conference in its history,” Business in Vancouver (May 20-26, 2008), by Glen Korstrom [on Congress 2008, academic convener Richard Cavell]
  • “Congrès 2008,” Le Devoir, 31 May 2008.
  • “Congress 2008,” The Vancouver Sun (May 31, 2008), by Randy Shore.
  • “Dude, Where’s My Liberal?” interview by Pieta Woolley, The Georgia Straight, 16-23 February 2006, p. 13.
  • “CBC still committed to The One despite dismal ratings, criticism,” recorded interview by Victoria Ahearn for the Canadian Press, 24 July 2006 for rebroadcasting and reprinting thereafter in various news media (heard on Radio 600 in Vancouver).
  • “Cage and McLuhan,” CITR-FM (Vancouver, Canada), 4 December 1998 (20mins.)
  • “Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient,” live interview with Louise Adler, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 5 March 1997 (18 mins).
  • “Canadian Literary Transvetism,” Knowledge Network (British Columbia), aired 9-10pm, 5 May 1994 (with J. Wasserman and K. Sirluck)

 


(c) Conference Proceedings

  • “‘Comparative Canadian Literature’ as Crisis and Critique: Toward Comparative Cultural Studies,” Textual Studies in Canada 5 (1994): 7-14.
  • “Futurismo in Canada: The Bologna Connection,” in Bologna: la cultura italiana e le letterature moderne. Vita Fortunati et al, 3 vols. (Bologna: Longo, 1992):1: 265-270.
  • “The Dialogue of Being: Dialogical Form in Klein, Kroetsch and Kogawa,” in Canada ieri e oggi, ed. Giovanni Bonanno, 3 vols. (Fasano: Schena, 1986) 2:45-53.

(d) Other

  • “Medium&Message&MessAge&Baxter&,” foreword to H& IT ON: Iain Baxter& on Marshall McLuhan (Toronto: YYZ Gallery, 2012) 7-9.
  • War and Peace in the Global Village,” entry in the Dictionary of Transnational History, ed. Alsiva Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier (London: Palgrave, 2009) 1095
  • “Marshall McLuhan and the History of the Book,” The History of the Book in Canada 3: 1918-1980, ed. Carole Gerson  and Jacques Michon (Toronto: U Toronto P, 2007): 88-90.
  • “Canadian Book Design and Illustration,” in the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada, ed. W. H. New (Toronto: U Toronto P, 2002): 131-137.
  • “Discipline and Place,” essays and introduction by the Discipline and Place collective, Anglistica [Università Occidentale di Napoli] 4.1 (2000): 91-118 [all work was collaborative, and involved formulating questions, posing them to the interviewees, and following up on their answers]
  • (with the Discipline and Place Collective: G. Creese, S.Gunew, P. Gurstein, G. Pratt, L. Roman, B. Ross, R. San Juan, P. Vertinsky), “Moving Spaces / Firm Groundings: An Interview with Rey Chow,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 15 (1997): 509-532 [all work was collaborative, and included formulating questions, posing them to the interviewee, and following up on her answers]
  • “Gramsci, Antonio,” in Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms, general editor Irena R. Makaryk (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1993): 344-345 (double columns).
  • “Spatial Form,” in Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms, general editor Irena R. Makaryk (Toronto: U Toronto P,1993): 629-631 (double columns).
  • “Jane Rule,” in Profiles in Canadian Literature 7, ed. Jeffrey Heath (Toronto and Oxford: Dundurn P, 1991): 159-166 (double columns).
  • “Il Virgilio nella letteratura canadese,” Enciclopedia virgiliana (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1984), volume one, p. 646 (double columns).

Non-Refereed Publications

JournalsOther

(a) Journals (Reviews)

  • Review of Harold Adams Innis, The Bias of Communications, 2nd ed., intro. by Alexander John Watson, for the University of Toronto Quarterly 79.1 (2010) 418-9.
  • “Cosmic McLuhan,” review essay on Janine Marchessault, Marshall McLuhan (London: Sage, 2006) and Terrence Gordon, Everyman’s McLuhan (N.Y.: Mark Batty, 2007) for the Canadian Journal of Communication 34.1 (2009): 159-162
  • “Review of Alexander John Watson, Marginal Man: The Dark Vision of Harold Innis [U of Toronto P, 2006]” for the University of Toronto Quarterly [Letters in Canada issue] 77.1 (Winter 2008): 335-337.
  • “Dancing on the Faultlines of Discourse,” response to Christopher Dummitt, review of Love, Hate and Fear in Canada’s Cold War, ed. R. Cavell, in H-Canada@H-Net.msu.edu (Sep. 2004).
  • Review of Anne Innis Dagg, The Feminine Gaze: A Canadian Compendium of Non-Fiction Women Authors and Their Books, 1836-1945 (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2001), in biography 26.1 (2003): 187-190.
  • Review of Steven Totosy, Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application in University of Toronto Quarterly [Letters in Canada 1999] 70.1 (Winter 2000/2001): 313-314
  • Review of A Sense of Place: Re-Evaluating Regionalism in Canadian and American Writing, ed. Christian Riegel and Herb Wyile,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 26.2 (1999): 351-354.
  • Review of Irene Gammel, Sexualizing Power in Naturalism: Theodore Dreiser and Frederick Philip Grove, in the American Review of Canadian Studies 28.1 (Spring / Summer 1998): 202-204.
  • “Through a Gloss Darkly,” revs. of James Reaney, Lewis Carroll’s “Alice Through The Looking Glass and W.J.T. Mitchell’s The Reconfigured Eye for Canadian Literature 149 (1996): 120-122.
  • “Scopophobia,” review of R. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious and M. Jay, Downcast Eyes for Canadian Literature 146 (1995): 135-136.
  • “Caged Presences,” reviews of J. Reaney, Performance Poems; J. Cage, I-VI; G. Steiner, Real Presences for Canadian Literature 144 (1995), 193-195.
  • “Native Literature,” review of P. Petrone, Native Literature Canada: From the Oral Tradition to the Present in Textual Studies in Canada 1.1 (1992): 189-192.
  • “Videocrit,” review of The Apprenticeship of Mordecai Richler and Margaret Atwood: One Day in August (videocassettes) for Canadian Literature 131 (1991): 249-250.
  • “Cultural Memory,” review of Antonio Mazza, The Way I Remember It (recording), for Canadian Literature 128 (1991): 148-149.
  • “Image/Text,” review of Naomi Jackson Groves, One Summer in Québec: A.Y. Jackson in 1925; A. Moorhouse, Art, Sight and Language, for Canadian Literature 128 (1991).
  • “Personae,” review of Otto Friedrich, Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations, for Canadian Literature 127 (1990): 127-129
  • “Music,” review of John Beckwith and F. Hall, eds., Musical Canada; F.Hall ed. The Canadian Musical Heritage 3; and L. Poirier ed. The Canadian Musical Heritage 7, for Canadian Literature 127 (1990): 144-5.
  • “Sciences,” review of Suzanne Zeller, Inventing  Canada:  Early  Victorian  Canada  and  the  Idea  of  a  Trans-Continental  Nation for Canadian Literature 127 (1990): 161-162.
  • “Insalata Mista,” review of Il Veltro 29:2 (1985) [Special Issue: “Le relazioni tra l’Italia e il Canada”] for Canadian Literature 115 (1987): 253-255.
  • “Demon of Analogy,” review of Elsa Linguanti, L’itinerario del senso nella narrativa di Malcolm Lowry, for Canadian Literature 112 (1987): 87-88.
  • “Transliterature,” reviews of C. La Bossière, ed. Translation in Canadian Literature; B. Belyea and E. Dansereau, eds. Driving Home: A Dialogue Between Writers and Readers; and G. Archambault, The Man With a Flower in His Mouth, for Canadian Literature 106 (1985): 108-110.
  • Review of Ferruccio Masini, Dialettica dell’avanguardia: ideologia e utopia nella letteratura tedesca del 900 for the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 8.1(1981): 137-139.
  • Review of Luca Codignola (ed.), Canadiana: aspetti della storia e della letteratura canadese, for the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 8:4 (1981): 572-576.
  • Review of Caroline Bayard, The New Poetics in Canada and Québec, for Recherches sémiotiques / Semiotic Inquiry 10.1-3 (1990): 210-214.
  • “The Scene of Writing,” review of J. Derrida, The Truth in Painting, M. Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration and F. Meltzer, Salome and the Dance of Writing, for University of Toronto Quarterly 58.4 (1989): 521-525.
  • “Canadian Literature in Italy,” Canadian Literature 87 (1980): 153-156.

 


(b) Other Non-Refereed

  • Research and editorial assistant, Heritage Inventory: Downtown South, by Peter Vaisbord; introduction by Michael Kluckner (Vancouver: Community Arts Council, 1991)
  • spectresofmcluhan.arts.ubc.ca: a digital resource for research on the media theory of Marshall Mcluhan, 1981 to the present; SSHRC funded.