Edmund Snow Carpenter (1922-2011)

• Published in: Canadian journal of communication Vol. 36; no. 3; p. 513
• Main Author: Heyer, Paul
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Toronto University of Toronto Press 01.07.2011
• Subjects: Anthologies; Anthropology; Carpenter, Edmund; Collaboration; Communication; Cultural anthropology; Death & dying; Graduate studies; McLuhan, Herbert Marshall (1911-1980); Media studies; Motion pictures; Semiotics; Teachers; Writers; Canada
• ISSN: 0705-3657; 1499-6642

As an undergraduate at Sir George Williams University (now part of Concordia) during the late 1960s, I was in awe of two forces in the cultural Zeitgeist: the films of Stanley Kubrick and the phenomenon of [Marshall McLuhan] However, it was [Edmund Snow Carpenter]'s writings, which I came to through McLuhan, that inspired me to pursue graduate work in anthropology and then later seek a career in communication studies. When I eventually entered the MA program at the New School for Social Research, I carried with me a copy of the Carpenter/McLuhan anthology, Explorations in Communication (i960), which contains choice morsels from one of the great intellectual experiments of the twentieth century, the Explorations project they developed at the University of Toronto from 1953-59.1 A Carpenter essay in Explorations, "The New Languages," remains to this day the most revealing and accessible elaboration of what is now often called medium theory. When in graduate school it never occurred to me that I would ever meet, let alone have the opportunity to take courses with Carpenter, given his enigmatic reputation, global wanderings, and disdain for the more formal constraints of academe. But it did happen. I took sometiiing called "Anthropology of the Present," with the instructor listed as, "Sessional TBA," always an iffy sign. The fact that he introduced himself as "Carpenter, but just call me [Ted]," I took to be a coincidence. Could an Edmund be a Ted? However, when he began speaking I recognized the same insights and lyricism that characterize his writings. My fellow students had no idea who he was. "Okay," I thought, "more of him for me" and for two years I attended all his classes.