Archaeologies of Sound

Attempts to recover the audible experience of the Second World War are often frustrated by the paradox that the acoustic past is available in theory but elusive in practice. Focusing on the archival traces left by poet and broadcaster Louis MacNeice, this paper considers how scholars might reconstruct past radio publics - affiliative and critical communities of listening - from a partial record. As one of the most prominent and celebrated scriptwriters at the wartime BBC, MacNeice played a major role in shaping the British public's sense of itself and of the war. For MacNeice, good listening was good citizenship: in two major works, Alexander Nevsky (1941) and Christopher Columbus (1942), he uses aurally astute characters and layered acoustic spaces to model the process of navigating the crowded soundscapes of war. The plays build auditory worlds that mediate between the poles of hearing as a subjective, interior practice and listening as a public activity with political resonances. Through a close examination of scripts, recordings, production notes, and audience responses relating to these two plays, this paper traces the outline of the absent experience of listening in order to better understand the wartime British radio public

Publics · Soundscape · Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis · Photography and Visual Culture · Visual Culture and Art Theory

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