The May 2014 issue of the Torontoist, a magazine dedicated in its own words to capturing “the tenor and texture of life in Toronto,” published a story by Kevin Plummer about the origin of the Explorations journal in 1953 and its impact on Toronto life, at least Toronto academic life. The story was entitled Historicist: Explorations at the Vanguard of Communications Studies: The Short-lived but Influential Magazine overseen by Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan.
In the 1950s, anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, English professor Marshall McLuhan, and others were at the centre of an innovative working group at the University of Toronto investigating modes and media of communication from a variety of academic perspectives. The establishment of the journal Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication in 1953 provided an outlet for their discussions and emerging ideas. The Globe and Mail‘s literary critic, William Arthur Deacon, proclaimed that the intellectual magazine’s cultural importance marked “a coming-of-age in Canada.”
Its content was an eclectic mix of treatises, poems, excerpts from popular magazines, and clippings of advertisements, with subjects ranging from indigenous cultures or musical instruments in Africa to experiments conducted in television studios. The magazine was both intellectually exhilarating for its cutting-edge ideas, and ploddingly dull for the opacity of certain articles. In his biography of McLuhan, Coupland characterized the magazine as a “glorious stew of diamonds and rhinestones and Fabergé eggs and merde.” And, along with the Ford Foundation-funded Seminar on Culture and Communication, Explorations was instrumental in laying the foundation of modern media studies.
The journal’s original nine issues, published in limited numbers between 1953 and 1959, were considered collector’s items almost immediately upon their publication and now fetch more than $100 each—if you can find them.
The rest of this article which makes for fascinating reading and is highly recommended can be found online at:
