Mass Media The Uncertain Mirror

Uncertain Mirrors realigns magical realism within a changing critical landscape, from Aristotelian mimesis to Adorno's concept of negative dialectics. In between, the volume traverses a vast theoretical arena, from postmodernism and postcolonialism to Lévinasian philosophy and eco-criticism. The volume opens and closes with dialectical instability, as it recasts the mutability of the term "mimesis" as both a "world-reflecting" and a "world-creating" mechanism. Magical realism, the authors contend, offers another stance of the possible; it also situates the reader at a hybrid aesthetic matrix inextricably linked to postcolonial theory, postmodernism, Bakhtinian theory, and quantum physics. As Uncertain Mirrors explores, magical realist texts partake of modernist exhaustion as much as of postmodernist replenishment, yet they stem from a different "location of culture" and "direction of culture;" they offer complex aesthetic artifacts that, in their recreation of alternative geographic and semiotic spaces, dislocate hegemonic texts and ideologies. Their unrealistic excess effects a breach in the totalized unity represented by 19th century realism, and plays the dissonant chord of the particular and the non-identical.

In The Constitution in a Hall of Mirrors, David E. Smith presents a learned but accessible analysis of the interconnectedness of Canada's parliamentary institutions.

Canada has one of the most advanced mass-media systems in the world, which allows Canadians more access to American culture via television, the movies, and the Internet than ever before. At the same time, governments support the production and distribution of Canadian content to Canadians. In this fully updated fourth edition, Mary Vipond traces the rise of the traditional mass media in Canada, explores the new media, and discusses the influcence of old mass media on new media. Clearly written and persuasively argued, The Mass Media in Canada demonstrates the huge challenges government face today in trying to influence media content and considers the troubling questions of who decides what we read, watch, and hear.