ABSTRACT
The simultaneous and enduring fascination among both writers and radio producers with using montage techniques to remove the ‘centring’ effect of an omnipotent narrator is evident in almost every essay. Thankfully, the feedback loops in radio’s relationship with modernism—and modernism’s relationship with radio—have since been well and truly exposed. Literary scholars have revealed their interest in the inner workings of radio; radio scholars have unveiled some long-suppressed literary sensibilities of their own. The lack of narrative signposting in Louis MacNeice’s city portraits allowed the various voices and sounds heard floating out of the radio set to escape the constraining specificities of hard geography, as if they were floating freely across earthly borders. In radio and literature—again, separately and jointly—modernism reveals a consistent effort to give ‘voice’, imaginatively, to otherwise inexpressible feelings and sensations.
