Weak Theory, Weak Modernism

Sound and Literature

Unrecordable Sound: Media History, Technology and the Racial Unconscious*

Deafness and Sound

This paper draws on broadcast transcripts created by multilingual BBC monitors during the Second World War—which have received little scholarly attention—to consider how conflicting political disco...

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The Raj in radio wars: BBC Monitoring Reports on Broadcasts for Indian Audiences During the Second World War

Mulk Raj Anand's self-description – in a 1945 broadcast about war-time London – as an ‘impatient modernist’ highlights Anand's ability to harness the velocity of broadcast production, transmission, and reception into an aesthetic of speed. Pairing Anand's unpublished BBC scripts with his war-time novel The Big Heart (1945), I show how Anand's work remediating contemporary texts for broadcast accompanied a shift in his approach to writing fiction, using the technique of intertextual scaffolding to accelerate composition. This article proposes that the name of Anand's impatience was realism – that Anand's fascination with literary modernists such as Joyce and Woolf was tempered with a desire for the immediacy and social embeddedness of realism and that broadcasting encouraged Anand in his attempt to pair modernism's cosmopolitanism and polyvocality with realism's speed, engagement, even ephemerality. Challenging the often feeble distinction between realism and modernist anti-representational technics, Anand...

Daniel Ryan Morse

Papers

An ‘Impatient Modernist’: Mulk Raj Anand at the BBC