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91 books match the query 'Radio' and 7 start with p

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Phantasmic Radio

Allen S. Weiss

Duke University Press, 1995

The alienation of the self, the annihilation of the body, the fracturing, dispersal, and reconstruction of the disembodied voice: the themes of modernism, even of modern consciousness, occur as a matter of course in the phantasmic realm of radio. In this original work of cultural criticism, Allen S. Weiss explores the meaning of radio to the modern imagination. Weaving together cultural and technological history, aesthetic analysis, and epistemological reflection, his investigation reveals how radiophony transforms expression and, in doing so, calls into question assumptions about language and being, body and voice.
Phantasmic Radio presents a new perspective on the avant-garde radio experiments of Antonin Artaud and John Cage, and brings to light fascinating, lesser-known work by, among others, Valère Novarina, Gregory Whitehead, and Christof Migone. Weiss shows how Artaud’s "body without organs" establishes the closure of the flesh after the death of God; how Cage’s "imaginary landscapes" proffer the indissociability of techne and psyche; how Novarina reinvents the body through the word in his "theater of the ears." Going beyond the art historical context of these experiments, Weiss describes how, with their emphasis on montage and networks of transmission, they marked out the coordinates of modernism and prefigured what we now recognize as the postmodern.

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Pieces of Sound

German Experimental Radio

Daniel Gilfillan

University of Minnesota Press, 2009

A cultural history of German radio broadcasting from the 1920s to today

Since the rise of film and television, radio has continued to evolve, with satellite radio and podcasts as its latest incarnations. Any understanding of the development of radio, like its visual counterparts, depends on closely examining the artistic ventures that preceded commercial acceptance.

In Pieces of Sound, Daniel Gilfillan offers a cultural history that explores these major aspects of the medium by focusing on German radio broadcasting, providing a context that sees beyond programming to consider regulations, cultural politics, and social standardization. Gilfillan showcases the work of radio pioneers and artists over the past century, including Brecht’s work with the form, and how radio was employed before and after World War II. He traces how German radio broadcasters experimented with networked media not only to expand the artistic and communicative possibilities of radio, but also to inform perceptions about the advantages and direction of newer telecommunications media like Internet broadcasting and pirate radio, which artists are using today to engage with a medium that is increasingly under corporate control. Gilfillan astutely observes how claims made for the Internet today echo those made for radio in its infancy and puts forth a broad and incisive historical analysis of German cultural broadcasting.

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Poetry FM

American Poetry and Radio Counterculture

Lisa Hollenbach

University of Iowa Press, 2023

Poetry FM is the first book to explore the dynamic relationship between post-1945 poetry and radio in the United States. Contrary to assumptions about the decline of literary radio production in the television age, the transformation of the broadcasting industry after World War II changed writers’ engagement with radio in ways that impacted both the experimental development of FM radio and the oral, performative emphasis of postwar poetry.

Lisa Hollenbach traces the history of Pacifica Radio—founded in 1946, the nation’s first listener-supported public radio network—through the 1970s: from the radical pacifists and poets who founded Pacifica after the war; to the San Francisco Renaissance, Beat, and New York poets who helped define the countercultural sound of Pacifica stations KPFA and WBAI in the 1950s and 1960s; to the feminist poets and activists who seized Pacifica’s frequencies in the 1970s. In the poems and recorded broadcasts of writers like Kenneth Rexroth, Jack Spicer, Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, Bernadette Mayer, and Susan Howe, one finds a recurring ambivalence about the technics and poetics of reception. Through tropes of static noise, censorship, and inaudibility as well as voice, sound, and signal, these radiopoetic works suggest new ways of listening to the sounds and silences of Cold War American culture.

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Points on the Dial

Golden Age Radio beyond the Networks

Alexander Russo

Duke University Press, 2010

The golden age of radio is often recalled as a time when the medium unified the nation, when families gathered around the radios in homes across the country to listen to live, commercially sponsored network broadcasts. In Points on the Dial, Alexander Russo revises our understanding of radio’s past by revealing the hidden histories of production, distribution, and reception practices during this era, which extended from the 1920s into the 1950s. Russo brings to light a tiered broadcasting system with intermingling but distinct national, regional, and local programming forms, sponsorship patterns, and methods of program distribution. Examining a wide range of practices, including regional networking, sound-on-disc transcription, the use of station representatives, spot advertising, and programming aimed at homes with several radios, he not only recasts our understanding of the relationship between national networks and local stations but also charts the development of new ways of listening—often distractedly rather than attentively—that set the stage for radio in the second half of the twentieth century.

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Powerful Frequencies

Radio, State Power, and the Cold War in Angola, 1931–2002

Marissa J. Moorman

Ohio University Press, 2019

Powerful Frequencies details the central role that radio technology and broadcasting played in the formation of colonial Portuguese Southern Africa and the postcolonial nation-state, Angola. In Intonations, Marissa J. Moorman examined the crucial relationship between music and Angolan independence during the 1960s and ’70s. Now, Moorman turns to the history of Angolan radio as an instrument for Portuguese settlers, the colonial state, African nationalists, and the postcolonial state. They all used radio to project power, while the latter employed it to challenge empire.

From the 1930s introduction of radio by settlers, to the clandestine broadcasts of guerrilla groups, to radio’s use in the Portuguese counterinsurgency strategy during the Cold War era and in developing the independent state’s national and regional voice, Powerful Frequencies narrates a history of canny listeners, committed professionals, and dissenting political movements. All of these employed radio’s peculiarities—invisibility, ephemerality, and its material effects—to transgress social, political, “physical,” and intellectual borders. Powerful Frequencies follows radio’s traces in film, literature, and music to illustrate how the technology’s sonic power—even when it made some listeners anxious and frightened—created and transformed the late colonial and independent Angolan soundscape.

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