Seminar in the 20th Century

This seminar will explore radio drama as a unique literary genre, performance art form, and media artifact. Although often viewed today as a primitive forerunner of today's podcasts and audio-fiction, radio drama has had a long and storied tradition. The first half of the semester will explore flashpoints in the history of dramatic storytelling on the radio, beginning with early experiments with the genre in the 1920s and moving on through the twentieth century to the resugence of audio storytelling in the present day. Themes will include the intersections of radio drama with politics (populism and fascism, democratization and decolonialization, civil rights movements throughout the world) and the impacts of new developments in sound technology (electronic music and stereophony). In the second half of the semester, students will have the opportunity to delve further into research on radio drama in the cultural context of their choosing, while we read and discuss different approaches to analyzing the genre, including perspectives from audionarratology, translation and adaptation studies, soundscape studies, archival histories, and theories of listening. Examples will be drawn from a variety of languages; students will have the opportunity to practice close listening and soundscape analysis even when the text of the radio drama is in a language with which they are unfamiliar.
Course Attributes:

Seminar in the 20th Century

GERMANIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 527

Section 01

Section A