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Title
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Etherized Victorians: Drama, narrative, and the American radio play, 1929--1954.
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Identifier
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AAI3144102
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identifier
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3144102
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Creator
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Heuser, Harry.
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Contributor
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Adviser: David H. Richter
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Date
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2004
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | Mass Communications | Theater
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Abstract
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Drawing on a collection of approximately five hundred published scripts and ten thousand recordings, "Etherized Victorians" endeavors to regenerate the discourse about an eclectic and boundaries-defying hybrid of dramatic, narrative, and lyric plays written or adapted for US radio during a period that is nostalgically referred to as the medium's golden age---a quarter of a century shaped by the Great Depression, World War II, and the rise of the Cold War. How did aural play develop within---according to or in spite of---the confines of commercial or propagandistic broadcasting and vis-a-vis established print and visual media? Why did these soundtexts, which range from short vaudeville routines to decades-spanning serials, from occasional verse to episodic drama, cease to be a popular form of dramatic storytelling? And what does their fabulous rise and summary eclipse tell us about American culture, psyche, and society in what Walter J. Ong termed the self-conscious "age of secondary orality"? Informed by the writings of communications theorists, broadcasting historians, radio playwrights and their contemporary critics, as well as the cataloguing efforts of extra-academic old-time radio aficionados, the interdisciplinary study contrasts the potentialities of the medium with the broadcasters' praxis of negotiating and reconciling the at times conflicting aims of producers, artists, and patrons. This confrontation of the prevalent Victorianisms of American broadcasting (theatricality, serialization, and bowdlerization) with plays reflecting an ambivalence toward the commodification and codification of mass entertainment involved a great number of American poets, dramatists and novelists, including W. H. Auden, Maxwell Anderson, Sherwood Anderson, Stephen Vincent Benet, Pearl S. Buck, Marc Connelly, Langston Hughes, Fannie Hurst, Arthur Laurents, Archibald MacLeish, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Arthur Miller, William Saroyan, Irwin Shaw, and Herman Wouk, as well as radio playwrights like Norman Corwin, Lucille Fletcher, Carlton E. Morse, and Arch Oboler. What emerges in readings of their works and accounts of their experiences is the story of a literary bastard, a lively yet transient art, demotic and eager to please, while all along, reminded of its obsolescence and ultimate inconsequentiality, rehearsing its protracted denouement.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
