Chapter 16 - Wireless Imaginations

Summary

The future development of literary radio studies as a discipline requires moving beyond the lingering (and completely understandable) text-fetishism of its early years. Archival lacunae covering the early years of radio, key years for modernist production – the difficulty of hearing works, let alone hearing them in context – has paradoxically flattened broadcast into script, an elision often perpetuated in scholarship. All this has created a critical environment in which the claim that radio is an intrinsically modernist medium is often supported, in circular fashion, by enumerating the already-recognized modernists within broadcast ranks, or citing the importance of radio as a disseminator of modernist poetry – in other words, eliding the medium itself in order to stress its efficacy as a delivery system. To move beyond the invaluable spadework of the recent ‘boom’, then, requires a more robust methodology for tracing the resonances of radio – an intermedial vocabulary not grounded exclusively in inscription