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Archaeologies of Sound: Reconstructing Louis MacNeice's Wartime Radio Publics

Archaeologies of Sound: Reconstructing Louis MacNeice's Wartime Radio Publics <jats:p> Attempts to recover the audible experience of the Second World War are often frustrated by the paradox that the acoustic past is available in theory but elusive in practice. Focusing on the archival traces left by poet and broadcaster Louis MacNeice, this paper considers how scholars might reconstruct past radio publics – affiliative and critical communities of listening – from a partial record. As one of the most prominent and celebrated scriptwriters at the wartime BBC, MacNeice played a major role in shaping the British public's sense of itself and of the war. For MacNeice, good listening was good citizenship: in two major works, Alexander Nevsky (1941) and Christopher Columbus (1942), he uses aurally astute characters and layered acoustic spaces to model the process of navigating the crowded soundscapes of war. The plays build auditory worlds that mediate between the poles of hearing as a subjective, interior practice and listening as a public activity with political resonances. Through a close examination of scripts, recordings, production notes, and audience responses relating to these two plays, this paper traces the outline of the absent experience of listening in order to better understand the wartime British radio public. </jats:p> http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Modernist Cultures Edinburgh University Press

Archaeologies of Sound: Reconstructing Louis MacNeice's Wartime Radio Publics

Whittington, Ian
Modernist Cultures , Volume 10 (1): 44 – 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.2015.0097
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

<jats:p> Attempts to recover the audible experience of the Second World War are often frustrated by the paradox that the acoustic past is available in theory but elusive in practice. Focusing on the archival traces left by poet and broadcaster Louis MacNeice, this paper considers how scholars might reconstruct past radio publics – affiliative and critical communities of listening – from a partial record. As one of the most prominent and celebrated scriptwriters at the wartime BBC, MacNeice played a major role in shaping the British public's sense of itself and of the war. For MacNeice, good listening was good citizenship: in two major works, Alexander Nevsky (1941) and Christopher Columbus (1942), he uses aurally astute characters and layered acoustic spaces to model the process of navigating the crowded soundscapes of war. The plays build auditory worlds that mediate between the poles of hearing as a subjective, interior practice and listening as a public activity with political resonances. Through a close examination of scripts, recordings, production notes, and audience responses relating to these two plays, this paper traces the outline of the absent experience of listening in order to better understand the wartime British radio public. </jats:p>

Journal

Modernist Cultures – Edinburgh University Press

Published: Mar 1, 2015

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