- Broadcasting Modernism
Few technological developments in the early twentieth century had a more sweeping impact on cultural life in Great Britain, Europe, and North America than the growth and spread of radio. From its humble beginnings in the late nineteenth century as a form of point-to-point wireless telegraphic communication—a technology primarily of interest only to maritime shipping, the military, and amateur operators—to its evolution in the 1920s into a medium that could broadcast speech, music, and other sounds into the living room of anyone with a receiver, radio swiftly became a nearly ubiquitous presence in the lives of modernist-era individuals. With the founding of the BBC in 1922 and NBC and CBS in 1926 and 1927, citizens of Great Britain and the United States could listen to an uninterrupted flow of regularly scheduled entertainment and news programming that competed with literature and other forms of print media for audience attention. Indeed, across the globe, the new medium of radio poured forth a torrent of speech and sound that threatened or promised, depending on one's perspective, to shrink distance, accelerate cultural exchange, and reconfigure ideas of self, culture, nation, and authorship. [End Page 254]
Unfortunately, the influence of radio on modernist cultural production has until recently gone largely unexamined. With the exception of Todd Avery's Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922–1938 (2006) and Timothy C. Campbell's Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi (2006), most book-length studies of radio either focus on the social history of sound and media or consider the subject from the more general, less specifically modernist perspective of sound theory. Broadcasting Modernism begins to redress this oversight. Edited by Debra Rae Cohen, Michael Coyle, and Jane Lewty, this collection of fifteen variously authored essays explores—from a range of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives—the multiple ways in which radio shaped cultural imagination and literary expression in the modernist era. It also offers fruitful reflection on the excitement and anxiety that the new medium occasioned among its supporters and critics. From Filippo Marinetti's rhapsodic celebration of the "wireless imagination" (Timothy C. Campbell) to Theodor Adorno's critical reflections on commercial radio in his unpublished manuscript Current of Music (David Jenemann), Broadcasting Modernism examines the deeply divided responses of writers and cultural commentators to this new communication technology.
The first third of the collection, titled "Medium and Metaphor," investigates the varied ways radio captured the imaginations of elite and popular authors and audiences. Aaron Jaffe draws parallels between the writings and promotional activities of Guglielmo Marconi and Nikola Tesla, radio's two most famous inventors, and Joseph Conrad's preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus" (1897). Jeffrey Sconce discovers popularly held links among radio, psychoanalysis, telepathy, and the occult in pulp fiction of the 1920s and 1930s. Timothy C. Campbell situates Filippo Marinetti's 1912 "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature" in relation to the marconista, the wireless telegrapher who employed his listening skills to pick out telegraphic signals from the noise and atmospheric discharges that plagued early radio transmissions. Martin Spinelli identifies in the radio broadcasts of Orson Welles and Norman Corwin a "ritual dimension of theatrical language" with strong ties to Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty. And David Jenemann finds in the unpublished writings of Theodor Adorno a belief that "radio offered to subjects the possibility of new types of bodies and new forms of subjectivation, but ones that carried with them the threat of capitulation to authoritarian aims." [End Page 255]
Of these essays, the two most revelatory are those by Sconce and Jenemann. Both remind readers that the now-prosaic medium of radio was once widely regarded as an uncanny, animist force capable of dissolving distinctions between the ego, the physical self, and the external world. Drawing upon the work of Sigmund Freud and such pulp writers as Tom Curry, whose story "The Soul Snatcher" (1930) expresses anxiety about radio's apparent seeding of the ether with "disembodied voices and spectral presences," Sconce traces the...