Radio Studies and 20th‐Century Literature: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Remediation

Abstract

This article provides an overview of the history of radio studies as it intersects with 20th-century literary studies, and outlines recent research trends in the field. Beginning with the earliest theorists and practitioners of radio (including Hilda Matheson, Rudolf Arnheim, and Lance Sieveking), the article considers how mid-20th-century attitudes to radio as a medium of cultural expression varied among Marxist thinkers (Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, and Bertolt Brecht), sociologists (Paul Lazarsfeld and Hadley Cantril), and media theorists (Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong). The article then examines how two recent scholarly developments -the expanded conception of modernist culture under the name of the "new modernist studies" and the growth of sound studies as an interdisciplinary field with both aesthetic and historical implications -have, since the mid-1990s, inaugurated a new wave of literary radio scholarship. These distinct but related developments have fostered newly integrated approaches to the study of radio as a medium that intersects not only with literature but with other media; the article therefore provides a summary of recent works that approach radio through a lens of remediation (the mutual influence and interpenetration of various media), as well as works that consider the aesthetic and ethical potential of the medium. The article closes by noting important avenues still to be explored, including questions of cultural hierarchy and "the middlebrow," transnational broadcasting, and the cultural life of radio in the age of television and beyond.

L’intervista immaginata

“…Davanti a costui, la donna si fa interprete di «un nuovo rapporto interpersonale tra i due sessi, per farla finita con quel banale, inevitabile rapporto di ambiguità, di porcheria molliccia tra femmina e maschio a tutto vantaggio sempre del maschio gallo e aggressore» e si proclama infine fondatrice di «questa cosa» a cui noi «moderni» abbiamo dato il nome di «femminismo» (Santucci 2006, 243-4). 34 Il fenomeno è noto con il nome di remediation, cioè l'appropriazione di un medium in un altro (Bolter e Grusin 1999, 21-50), studiato nello specifico anche per la radio (Whittington 2014). Se vogliamo, una fase precedente ai fenomeni di Deep Remixability o Hybridization del software come metalinguaggio (Manovich 2010, 159-240, 267-76), evidente ad esempio nella piattaforma YouTube che contiene le Interviste impossibili trasmesse in origine alla radio.…”

Erika Mann, the BBC German Service, and Foreign-Language Broadcasting during WWII

“…In response to Ian Whittington's suggestion that "the tendency to downplay the roles played by human systems in shaping and regulating" the "mutually influencing technologies" of the modern period amounts to a critical "shortcoming" in radio studies, I use Mann's experiences as radio broadcaster and consultant to discuss the various, at times controversial, directives informing editorial decisions, program delivery, and staffing choices in Allied broadcasting to Germany. 5 Mann's politically inspired cosmopolitanism clearly echoed modernism's international sensibilities, but her BBC work occurred at a time of unprecedented political unrest. At this moment, political convictions of intellectuals such as Mann were put to the test because the global spread of fascism seemed to leave them no choice but to lend their support to democratic governments that many of them considered only insufficiently liberal or tolerant in outlook.…”