Modernism at the Microphone

Melissa Dinsman is a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Visual Studies, University of Notre Dame, USA.

Dinsman’s volume is refreshing in its treatment of radio as a medium for which national borders are permeable, if persistent, barriers to cultural exchange. By connecting the wartime output of writers from Germany (Thomas Mann, Theodor Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, and Walter Benjamin), the United States (Archibald MacLeish, Ezra Pound, and Orson Welles), Britain (Dorothy Sayers, Louis MacNeice, and George Orwell), and the British Empire (Mulk Raj Anand), Dinsman captures the global extent of wartime broadcasting and its ability to forge networks for both quasi-military aggression and cultural connection … By addressing a broad swath of the figures who made important contributions to wartime radio, Dinsman makes a significant contribution to the fields of wartime literary and cultural study.

• 1. Introduction: The Voices of War2. War on the Air: Adorno’s and Welles’s Radio Writings3. Militarizing the Messiah: Sayers’s and Eliot’s Christian Rebranding of Wartime Britain4. MacNeice’s “Transatlantic Call”: Modernist Complexity in a Mass Aural Medium5. Orwell and his BBC “Voice”: Propaganda, Literature, and New Networks6. Clogged Communication: The Broadcasting and Epistolary Networks of MacLeish and Pound7. Haunted Network: Mann’s Los Angeles Broadcasts to Germany8. CodaBibliographyIndex