“Many plays have been broadcast, but none of them seems to me to have the pep that is needed to get not merely across the footlights but across the ether.” Complaints such as this one are all too familiar to me; in fact, they were launched so frequently against radio culture that, years ago, they prompted me to contest them.
To misappropriate the famous question posed by the feminist critic Linda Nochlin, I asked “Why Are There No Great Radio Writers?” The objective was not to find examples to the contrary—those queer, quirky and quicksilver exceptions that can serve to prove the rule—but to query the question itself as (mis)leading and to expose the biases underlying it.
Continue reading ““… unequal emission”: “Interference,” “Modern Wireless,” and the “Wilds of Electronia””
Harry Heuser 