Fiction on the Radio: Remediating Transnational Modernism
FICTION ON THE RADIO: REMEDIATING TRANSNATIONAL MODERNISM ____________________________________________________________ A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board ____________________________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ____________________________________________________________ by Daniel Ryan Morse May 2014 Examining Committee Members: Priya Joshi, Advisory Chair, English Sheldon Brivic, English Paul Saint-Amour, English, University of Pennsylvania James English, External Member, English, University of Pennsylvania ii © Copyright 2014 by Daniel Ryan Morse All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT The BBC was the laboratory for major experiments in modernism. Notions of aesthetics, audience, and form were tried out before the microphones of 200 Oxford St., London and heard around the world, often before they were in England. The format of the radio address and the instant encounter with listeners shaped both the production and politics of Anglophone modernism to an extent hitherto unacknowledged in literary studies. This dissertation focuses on how innovative programming by modernist writers, transmitted through instantaneous radio links, closed the perceived physical, cultural, and temporal distances between colony and metropole. Charting the phenomenon of writing for, about, and around broadcasting in the careers of E. M. Forster, Mulk Raj Anand, James Joyce, and C. L. R. James, the dissertation revises the traditional temporal and geographical boundaries of modernism. Contrary to the intentions of the BBC’s directors, who hoped to export a monolithic English culture, empire broadcasting wreaked havoc on the imagined boundaries between center and periphery, revealing the extent to which the colonies paradoxically affected the cultural scene “at home.” The Eastern Service (directed to India), where the abstract idea of a serious, cultural station was put into practice, was the laboratory for the Third Programme, England’s post-war cultural channel.
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