Radio’s Vernacular Modernism

Rather than focusing on the exceptional modernist texts that punctured the scheduled flow of everyday radio, this paper will propose that the early BBC schedule can be read as a modernist ‘text’ in its own right. Reading the schedule in this way reveals the flow of broadcasting as a pervasive and insistent source of vernacular modernism, inviting its listeners into a reflexive engagement with the conditions and contradictions of modernity.

Public talk, funded by a CModS Small Project Grant.

Contact: emilie.morin@york.ac.uk and david.clayton@york.ac.uk