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Introduction

Introduction Debra Rae Cohen and Michael Coyle The first ten years of the `sonic turn' in modernist studies did much to establish the importance of radio not only within twentieth-century media ecology but also in terms of its formal impact, its shaping effect, on the `structures of innovation' of modernist text. In our 2009 edited collection, Broadcasting Modernism, we registered the centrality of radio to modernist literary and cultural production, attempting to rectify a long-standing bias in the study of modernism and media towards technologies of inscription, rather than of transmission. We established the widespread involvement of modernist authors with radio not only in the most literal of senses ­ as broadcasters, dramatists, and authors of radio talks ­ but also as sensitive listeners who registered radio waves in their writing. In the oracular booming of Marxist writers, the circulatory poetics of Wallace Stevens, and the `radiooscillating epiepistle' of Finnegans Wake, reverberations of broadcasting make themselves felt.1 But in the years since, that proposition as we state it above has come to feel more than a little simplistic, more than a little dangerous, redolent of an easy technological determinism that still claims modernist writing as the sensitive litmus paper http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Modernist Cultures Edinburgh University Press

Introduction

Cohen, Debra Rae; Coyle, Michael
Modernist Cultures , Volume 10 (1): 1 – Mar 1, 2015
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Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
Copyright
© Edinburgh University Press 2015
Subject
Articles; Film, Media and Cultural Studies
ISSN
2041-1022
eISSN
1753-8629
DOI
10.3366/mod.2015.0094
Publisher site
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Abstract

Debra Rae Cohen and Michael Coyle The first ten years of the `sonic turn' in modernist studies did much to establish the importance of radio not only within twentieth-century media ecology but also in terms of its formal impact, its shaping effect, on the `structures of innovation' of modernist text. In our 2009 edited collection, Broadcasting Modernism, we registered the centrality of radio to modernist literary and cultural production, attempting to rectify a long-standing bias in the study of modernism and media towards technologies of inscription, rather than of transmission. We established the widespread involvement of modernist authors with radio not only in the most literal of senses ­ as broadcasters, dramatists, and authors of radio talks ­ but also as sensitive listeners who registered radio waves in their writing. In the oracular booming of Marxist writers, the circulatory poetics of Wallace Stevens, and the `radiooscillating epiepistle' of Finnegans Wake, reverberations of broadcasting make themselves felt.1 But in the years since, that proposition as we state it above has come to feel more than a little simplistic, more than a little dangerous, redolent of an easy technological determinism that still claims modernist writing as the sensitive litmus paper

Journal

Modernist Cultures – Edinburgh University Press

Published: Mar 1, 2015

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