Broadcasting Modernism (review)

In a recent editorial in the New York Times, "The Year of Tweeting," David Carr writes that "the real value of [Twitter] is listening to a wired collective voice."¹ "Voice," of course, is used here metaphorically. Taken literally, listening to a collective voice applies more precisely to the radio technology of the twentieth century than to texting in the early twenty-first. Yet Carr's metaphor suggests the powerful and lasting influence of radio in shaping how we conceptualize communication technologies in general. Indeed, it provides a contemporary instance of what Timothy Campbell has termed the "radio imaginary."² That imaginary is the subject of this important and timely collection. Broadcasting Modernism decisively lays bare the impact of radio on modern culture and modernist writing. Radio, the editors claim, was "instrumental" in shaping "Modernist textualities" and, in fact, "the very sense of the artist's mission" (2, 3). Although sound technology generally and radio in particular have been the focus of much modernist scholarship over the past two decades,³ "no volume to date," the editors write in their introduction, "has claimed for its focus the centrality and indeed the inescapability of radio as a feature of the Modernist landscape" (6). The fifteen essays that follow—all but four published here for the first time—bear out those claims.

Broadcasting Modernism contains a wealth of information about radio technology and the history of broadcasting even for those familiar with recent sound scholarship. More importantly, through case studies of a wide range of authors spanning three generations—from Filippo Marinetti in the 1910s to Lorine Niedecker in the 1960s—Broadcasting Modernism interrogates and explodes the temporal and spatial dimensions of modernism, providing new conceptual frameworks for future scholarship. The essays are information-rich and, on the whole, engaging. Together they show, in David Jeneman's words, "how a century of recorded sound . . . has utterly transformed what it means to be human" and how radio, as Debra Rae Cohen writes, "shaped literary production in ways we are only now beginning to trace" (102, 155).

Richard Rorty has characterized "intellectual progress" as "a history of increasingly useful metaphors,"⁴ and the five essays comprising part 1, "Mediums and Metaphors," clearly demonstrate the "potency of radio as an idea" (6). "Black-boxing," "radio-shacking," "the wireless imagination," and "telepathy" are just some of the conceptual models that made up the "radio imaginary" of the modernist era and that served to refigure notions of modern subjectivity and modernist authorship (16, 17, 33, 51). Products of "spatial dislocation and temporal transience," radio and modernism, Aaron Jaffe writes, are both "beyond the prerogatives of author-inventors" (114). Countering the modernists' tendency to fetishize authorship that he has written about elsewhere,⁵ Jaffe here conceives modernist writers as "applied technologists" and authorship as a "medium of invention" (14, 13). As if playing off Jaffe's coinage—"radio-shacking"—Timothy Campbell rereads Marinetti's aesthetics through Guglielmo Marconi's innovations in radio technology, offering the metaphor of the poet as a marconista or wireless operator. The marconista, isolated in the radio shack, listened acutely, interpreting and inscribing the sounds he heard on paper, just as the modernist poet, for Marinetti, "converts the sights and sounds of modern life into writing" (52). For Jeffrey Sconce, telepathy links radio and psychoanalysis as "technologies of dislocated identity" insofar as disembodied messages are conveyed through an ineffable medium: the airwaves or the unconscious (33). These and other essays in part 1 delineate how radio's "time shifting omnipresence" and the anxiety it generated over the "interface between humanity and technology" played out in a range of modernist writings from Sigmund Freud to Theodor Adorno (78, 91).

Parts 2 and 3 present readings of individual writers, whether to illustrate the broader implications of American and British radio for modernism (part 2) or to examine the writers' specific engagements with radio (part 3). T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Desmond MacCarthy, Gertrude Stein, Richard...