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Modernism at the Microphone: Radio, Propaganda, and Literary Aesthetics During World WarII. Melissa Dinsman. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, $89.99, hardback, 247 pp.
Radio was an essential weapon in the war of words between the Allied and Axis powers during World War II; and yet, even if this fact has been firmly established, wartime broadcasting still remains poorly understood. Recently, scholars have taken up broadcasting as a subject of literary, rather than exclusively historical, analysis. Melissa Dinsman's Modernism at the Microphone: Radio, Propaganda, and Literary Aesthetics During World War II offers a recent example of such work, applying literary approaches to texts that have seemed fundamentally "unliterary"- propaganda broadcasts.
Although some propaganda broadcasts are explicit in their political content, extolling patriotism and national commitments and vilifying the enemy, others are subtler in their approach. Examples of this less overt propaganda include literary broadcasts by prominent writers; radio plays, literary reviews, and readings that seem distant from military struggle, and yet, represent another front in the battle for the hearts and minds of listeners. Dinsman agrees with George Orwell's claim that, "All writing nowadays is propaganda," but follows this insight with important questions about the relationship between propaganda and wartime aesthetics (qtd in 97). Surveying a range of writers on both sides of the Atlantic, including Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno, Orson Welles, Dorothy L. Sayers, Louis MacNeice, Orwell, Ezra Pound, Archibald MacLeish, Thomas Mann, and P.G. Wodehouse, Dinsman identifies the reasons writers flocked to the microphone, their diverse range of techniques, and their often-conflicting conceptions of audience. One of the tensions running through this work is whether radio broadcasting was inherently autocratic and disposed towards "black" propaganda meant to mislead and obscure, or conversely, whether broadcasting could be a democratic medium, encouraging critical thinking, and thereby amenable to "white" propaganda presenting information and allowing listeners to choose for themselves. In Germany, for instance, the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels wrote unambiguously about the power of radio to foster conformity and blind allegiance, while the playwright Bertolt Brecht believed that radio writing could promote active listening and independent thought.
The radio wars that Dinsman describes were often fought...