Broadcasting Modernism (review)

By nearly all accounts, both the pleasure and the panic of early radio were bought on by new, unsettling experiences of proximity. In the few short decades of its development and institutionalization, the device seemed to transgress all traditional boundaries—physical, psychological, and social—and thus, in its uncanny intimacy, became a source of wonder and threat for both modernists and mortals alike. Arguably, the device may be the most significantly “modernist” invention of all, insofar as its very sound—its very sounding—upended representational praxis as such, dissolving habitual relations of space and time and confounding conventional configurations of identity. To state that Broadcasting Modernism merely makes these claims would be a gross understatement. This clever and colorful collection not only substantiates them, but also models, again and again, the significant ways in which they might be mobilized for modernist scholars. In fact, I can think of few better demonstrations of the way in which critical form might be productively matched to content. Reading Broadcasting Modernism grants all the pleasures of channel surfing itself; the reader is given a broad range of frequencies to sample, from highbrow to lowbrow, poetic to political, European to American. But, more importantly, the book enacts the thrilling wooziness occasioned by the apparatus itself, revealing both the uncanny proximities and vertiginous distances between many of the era’s key texts and figures. Here, the very airiness and unstable openness of the radio’s sound becomes the model for a supple and invigorating mode of scholarship, giving scholars a chance to rehear and rethink the key debates and issues of their period.

The editors have lightly but usefully organized their collection into three main sections. The first set of essays presents radio as a multi-faceted idea, as it inspired modernists of all stripes to rethink culture and cultural production; the second considers radio’s broad and significant influence on a range of modernist textual practice; and the third provides a series of case studies that focus on modernists who sought to negotiate the rapidly evolving worlds of print and radio. By and large, though, almost all the essays share an interest in radio as a form, as a means of broadcasting and organizing sound. In fact, while most of the pieces here have something to say about the ideological implications of radio, they prove most interesting—most productive—when they move away from explicit political debates to explore the device’s formal properties and phenomenological effects. Aaron Jaffe’s opening essay, for example, shows how the unique properties of radio transmission—as an expansive form of luminescence without light—inflected contemporary theories of cultural transmission and thus brought together the work of inventors and authors. Just as interestingly, Jeffrey Sconce’s piece explores radio as a mode of psychic telepathy and thus connects Freud’s speculative studies of the psyche with pulp fiction accounts of techno-modernity and its threat to psychic stability (dislocation, overstimulation, suggestibility, etc.). A number of pieces dwell specifically on the phenomenology of the radio voice. Here, I was most intrigued by Debra Rae Cohen’s essay on the “bland gentility” of the BBC voice and the difficulties it raised for leftist writers seeking public expression. Working in a more popular context, Lesley Wheeler explores Edna St. Vincent Millay’s voicing of her work in a series of American broadcasts and demonstrates how her performance continues to challenge standard notions of authenticity and naturalness.

Paradoxically, this emphasis on form (the supposed hallmark of modern elitism) proves a compelling means of bridging the era’s so-called Great Divide and perhaps brings us closer to the experiences of vernacular modernism than any explicitly historical study. In other words, radio as a mediating technology, stripped of essentializing political designations, becomes here a remarkable source of scholarly fusion and diffusion, giving these authors a chance approach culture in more open-ended ways. Here, Martin Spinelli’s essay proves a groundbreaker, as it provides a strikingly close reading of the rhetorical...