Philip Marchand

This article is about the journalist and writer Philip Marchand. For the lawyer and politician see Philippe Marchand .

Philip Marchand (born December 18, 1946 in Pittsfield , Massachusetts ) is a Canadian journalist and writer from the United States who has written for many years as a literary critic for various well-known North American newspapers and magazines. Since 2008 he has concentrated more on writing non-fiction books. For this activity he has already won several literary prizes in the past . So in 1989 for Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger (1989) the Floyd S. Chalmers Award in Ontario Historyand in 1990 to the BC Book Prizes belonging Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize .

Life

Philip Marchand was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts , to French Canadians who, on the threshold of the 20th century, moved via Québec to New Hampshire to work in the textile factories there. Philip Marchand was part of the civil rights movement in the United States and was an opponent of the Vietnam War . In response to later inquiries, he admitted that he had considered going to war anyway, in order to be able to write a great novel about the conflict in Southeast Asia , similar to Ernest Hemingway about the Spanish Civil War or Norman Mailer about the Second World War , but the prospect of it either to die or, if necessary, to return home crippled in body and soul, made him shy away. Like many other young men of his generation, he moved to neighboring Canada to evade military service and - as in his case - to study English literature at the University of Toronto . Since then he has spent almost all of his adult life in the North American metropolis of Toronto . Only in the 1980s did he and his wife live in Vancouver , British Columbia for six years .

His first magazine article, Moments of Grace in Sinful Toronto , about a commune of postmodern Jesus disciples, appeared in 1971 and heralded his career as a freelance journalist. During this period of his journalistic career he wrote for every regular Canadian magazine, including Maclean’s , 1974/1975 radio and television columnist, Saturday Night , Toronto Life and various other papers. In 1983 the Marchands moved to Vancouver for a variety of reasons. On the one hand, they had grown tired of Toronto and on the other, Philip Marchand got fewer and fewer jobs as a freelance journalist due to the economic recession in Toronto. Besides, he hadn't found a publisher for a finished detective novel. Since his sister-in-law, who lives in Vancouver, offered to help him through her contacts in the local press scene, it was no longer a question for her to move to western Canada. There he found the climate within the independent journalist scene to be more libertarian and more fertile, the direct private retreat into nature for hiking in the Gulf Islands as pleasant, so that the research work for his book project on Marshall McLuhan progressed quickly. He believed he would still be living in Vancouver today if the Toronto Star's editor-in-chief , John Honderich, hadn't called him in June 1989 and offered him a job as a book columnist.

Thus he became a permanent literary critic at the Toronto Star in 1989. He held this position for more than 18 years. At the beginning of 2008, on the instructions of his employer, he swapped his responsibilities with that of the former film critic Geoff Pevere in order to be one of the two journalists responsible for film reviews at the Toronto Star together with Peter Howell. After a long period of book reviews , Philip Marchand saw it as an interesting challenge. However, he was supposed to cease this activity after six months when the Toronto Star's board of directors presented its employees with a voluntary separation payment that Marchand accepted in order to reinforce his other interests, primarily the drafting of Books to be able to pursue.

His first non-fiction book was published in 1976: Just Looking, Thank You: An Amused Observer's View of Canadian Lifestyles , based on his previous cultural-critical essays from the perspective of the original American, described the diversity of Canadian peculiarities.

For his biographical portrait of the controversial media theorist Marshall McLuhan , Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger (1989), he received both the Floyd S. Chalmers Award in Ontario History (1989) and the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize (1990). The book was even translated into German nine years later, including the foreword by Neil Postman, which has been included since the revised new edition and received mostly positive reviews in the German-speaking area, while the negative voices tended to focus on the quality of the translation and the continuing uncertainty in recording the Depicted focused. The latter, however, was also due in particular to McLuhan's person. In any case, the work enjoyed a thorough reception in German-language specialist publications on media theory .

Philip Marchand himself wrote a Toronto detective novel , Deadly Spirits (1994). In 1998 he published Ripostes: Reflections on Canadian Literature, a compilation of his most important literary reviews and essays. In it he characterized in a retrospective, titled Margaret Laurence: Soul Woman , who portrayed the respected Canadian writer Margaret Laurence with all her peculiarities, since she could not make a distinction between her private life and her own literary work, so that she in a sense became a "work of art" herself. with all of its personal drawbacks. It lost all sense of irony , demanded moralists to exclude even moralists and became increasingly sentimental about the inhuman. As one of the first well-known literary critics, he complained about her tendency towards banalities. In the mid-1990s Marchand was one of the dominant literary critics in his home country, who complained to Rohinton Mistry that his works were becoming less Canadian: “There's something vaguely wrong with Mistry not writing about the country he has lived for 20 years.” During his work as a literary critic one of the few who back in 1999 in connection with Get Shorty! at Elmore Leonard noted a parallel in the (anti) heroes between his early western and later thriller stories in his reviews for the Toronto Star. Leonard agreed to this point of view a little later to a request on Canadian radio with some reservations. The German-born Canadian literary scholar and author Stephen Henighan also saw Philipp Marchand as one of those decisive literary critics of the Toronto cultural scene who suppressed unpleasant publications such as Timothy Findley's Headhunter (1993), who criticized the publishing industry in Canada.

Marchand continues to work as a literary and film columnist for various Canadian newspapers and magazines. Since autumn 2008, thanks to his contacts with the editors Mark Medley and Benjamin Errett, he has been writing the weekend column Open Book for the National Post . He also found pleasure in playing historical roles in television documentaries and films: “The acting is a combination of fun and tedium. But even the tedium is curiously soothing because you have no responsibility except to sit around and wait. Even when you do your acting - and my acting has been for television and films I should state - you're only following orders. The director tells you where to put your arm, how many beats to wait before delivering a line, and so on. I don't think I've learned anything new about myself. "

In January 2010 he acted for the first time as a respected author and former award winner as one of the jurors - together with Andreas Schroeder and Vicki Gabereau - in Vancouver for the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize and at that time, after reading 150 book suggestions , selected the journalist Ian Brown for his work The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Search for His Disabled Son . In 2011, Philip Marchand stayed in British Columbia again - this time as presiding judge - and, together with Alma Lee and Noah Richler, selected John Vaillant as the winner for The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival .

His planned current book project revolves around the Puritans in New England and their contrast to the French Canadians, about whom he had written a non-fiction book that was noted in North America and France: Ghost Empire: How the French Almost Conquered North America (2005). In a mixture of history, travelogue and memories, this book followed in the footsteps of the great 17th century explorer, Robert Cavelier de La Salle , around the Great Lakes and Mississippi River in search of the continuing French heritage this continent. Very unusual for a Canadian book author to date, each of his books has been published by a different publisher. In addition, his works have so far been translated into Chinese, German and French.

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Non-fiction and factual texts

• Just Looking, Thank You: An Amused Observer's View of Canadian Lifestyles. Macmillan of Canada, Toronto 1976 ISBN 0-770-51434-0
• Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger. Random House, Toronto 1989 & Ticknor & Fields, New York 1989 ISBN 0-899-19485-0
  • Marshall McLuhan. Media Ambassador . Biography. Translated from Martin Baltes. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt (DVA), Stuttgart 1999 ISBN 3-421-05306-5
• Ripostes: Reflections on Canadian Literature . Porcupine's Quill, Erin 1998 ISBN 0-889-84196-9
• Ghost Empire: How the French Almost Conquered North America . McClelland & Stewart, Toronto 2005, ISBN 978-0-7710-5677-2
• Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, sieur de La Vérendrye , in Legacy. How french Canadians shaped North America. Edited by André Pratte u. a. McClelland & Stewart, Toronto 2016; again in 2019 ISBN 0771072392 pp. 17 - 34
  • French edition: Bâtisseurs d'Amérique: Des canadiens français qui ont faite de l'histoire. La Presse, Montréal 2016

novel

• Deadly Spirits . Stoddart, Toronto 1994 ISBN 0-773-75641-8

Associate Editor

• Paul Benedetti, Nancy DeHart, Frank Zingrone, Philip Marchand (Eds.): Forward through the rearview mirror: Reflections on and by Marshall McLuhan. Prentice Hall Canada, Scarborough 1996 ISBN 0-134-94956-0

Web links

• Philip Marchand in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Official homepage of Philip Marchand
• Compilation of articles by Philip Marchand . In: National Post . Retrieved April 18, 2012.
• Listing of Philip Marchand's film reviews on Rotten Tomatoes . Retrieved April 18, 2012.
• Tainted Success and the Heroes of Martin Scorsese , an essay by Philip Marchand, in: Numéro Cinq Magazine , 19/26. December 2011. Retrieved April 18, 2012.
• Detailed biography , as of September 2019

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Marchand
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Laureano Ralon: Interview with Philip Marchand. ( Memento of the original from May 1, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The  archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Figure / Ground Communication. September 3, 2010. Retrieved April 19, 2012.
3. ↑ "I might have written a meaningful Vietnam novel (...) but on the other hand I might have come back without any arms or legs. (...) It would have been horrible, because I would have realized I'd done it for nothing. Because I knew it was for nothing (...) I knew the war was totally wrong. ”In: John Hagan: Northern Passage: American Vietnam War Resisters in Canada. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2001, p. 23, ISBN 0-674-00471-X .
4. ↑ http://philipmarchand.com/bio.html
5. ↑ http://philipmarchand.com/events.html
6. ↑ http://www.thestar.com/special/columnists/94624--marchand-philip ( Memento from October 10, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
7. ↑ Reception in the English-speaking world; Donald Wilhelm: Global Communications and Political Power. Transaction Books, New Brunswick 1990, p. 134, ISBN 0-887-38354-8 .
8. ↑ Elena Lamberti (Ed.): Marshall McLuhan's Mosaic: Probing the Literary Origins of Media Studies. University of Toronto Press, Toronto / Buffalo / London 2012, p. 97, ISBN 978-1-4426-4013-9 .
9. ↑ Donald F. Theall: The Virtual Marshall McLuhan. McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal 2001, p. 47, ISBN 0-773-52119-4 .
10. ^ Paul Grosswiler: Transforming McLuhan: Cultural, Critical, and Postmodern Perspectives. Peter Lang, New York a. a. 2010, p. 44, ISBN 978-1-4331-1067-2 .
11. ↑ James B. Martin (Ed.): Mass Media: A Bibliography With Indexes. Nova Science Publishers, New York 2002, p. 78, ISBN 978-1-5903-3262-7 .
12. ^ Marshall William Fishwick: Popular Culture in a New Age. Routledge, Binghamton, NY, 2002, p. 204, ISBN 0-7890-1297-9 .
13. ↑ http://www.bcbookprizes.ca/winners/1990#non-fiction
14. ↑ Philip Marchand: Marshall McLuhan. Media Ambassador . Biography, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt (DVA), Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-421-05306-5 .
15. ↑ Review summary on Philip Marchand: Marshall McLuhan. Media Ambassador . In: Pearl Divers . Retrieved April 19, 2012.
16. ↑ Daniela Kloock, Angela Spahr (ed.): Media theories: An introduction. UTB, Fink, Paderborn / Munich et al. 3rd edition 2007. P. 72. ISBN 978-3-8252-1986-4 .
17. ↑ Alexander Roesler (ed.): Basic concepts of media theory. UTB, Fink, Paderborn 2005, p. 80. ISBN 978-3-8252-2680-0 .
18. ^ Martin Schulz: Orders of the pictures: An introduction to picture science. Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Paderborn 2005, p. 106, ISBN 978-3-7705-4206-2 .
19. ^ Stefan Münker: Philosophy after the "Medial Turn": Contributions to the theory of the media society. transcript, Bielefeld 2009, p. 10, ISBN 978-3-8376-1159-5 .
20. ^ Matthias Petzold: Communication and media-theoretical remarks on the subjectivity-theoretical criticism of the theology of the Word of God . In: Ingolf U. Dalferth / Philipp Stoellger (ed.): Crises of subjectivity: problem areas of a contentious paradigm. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2005, pp. 417–454, here: p. 429, ISBN 978-3-1614-8773-6 .
21. ^ Siegfried Weischenberg: Max Weber and the disenchantment of the media world. Theories and quarrels - Another specialist story. Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2012, p. 359, ISBN 978-3-5311-8717-4 .
22. ^ Reception: William John Keith: Canadian Literature in English, Volume 2. The Porcupine's Quill, Erin, Ontario, 2007, p. 118, ISBN 978-0-8898-4283-0 .
23. ↑ TF Rigelhof: This is Our Writing. The Porcupine's Quill, Erin, Ontario, 2000, p. 194, ISBN 978-0-8898-4218-2 .
24. ^ Philipp Marchand: Mistry Writes Home. In: Toronto Star . December 3, 1995. F1.
25. ↑ See Cynthia Sugars: "World Famous Across Canada." National Identity in the Global Village. In: Clara AB Joseph: Global Fissures: Postcolonial Fusions. Rodopi, Amsterdam / New York 2006, pp. 79-102, here pp. 93f., ISBN 978-9-0420-2018-4 .
26. ↑ On his criticism of Mistry's Bombay , which he accused of repulsiveness: Arun Mukherjee: How Shall We Read South Asian Canadian Texts? (1998) In: Cynthia Conchita Sugars (Ed.): Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism. Ontario Broadview Press, Peterborough 2004, pp. 249-267, here p. 259, ISBN 978-1-5511-1437-8 .
27. ↑ Paul Clarence Challen: Get Dutch !: A Biography of Elmore Leonard. ECW Press, Toronto, Ontario, 2000, pp. 49f. ISBN 978-1-5502-2422-1 .
28. ↑ Stephen Henighan : When words deny the world. The reshaping of Canadian Writing . The Porcupine's Quill, Erin, Ontario 2002, ISBN 0-88984-240-X , p. 47.
29. ↑ Compilation of his articles ( Memento of the original from March 26, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In: National Post . Retrieved April 18, 2012.