An ‘Impatient Modernist
Mulk Raj Anand at the BBC
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8112000 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Daniel Ryan Morse (0000-0001-9045-0766, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 83-98 |
| Publication date | 2015-02-25 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Modernist Cultures (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1753-8629 • E-ISSN: 2041-1022 |
| Publisher | Edinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.3366/mod.2015.0099 |
| OpenAlex | W2009086037 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 1 |
Mulk Raj Anand's self-description – in a 1945 broadcast about war-time London – as an ‘impatient modernist’ highlights Anand's ability to harness the velocity of broadcast production, transmission, and reception into an aesthetic of speed. Pairing Anand's unpublished BBC scripts with his war-time novel The Big Heart (1945), I show how Anand's work remediating contemporary texts for broadcast accompanied a shift in his approach to writing fiction, using the technique of intertextual scaffolding to accelerate composition. This article proposes that the name of Anand's impatience was realism – that Anand's fascination with literary modernists such as Joyce and Woolf was tempered with a desire for the immediacy and social embeddedness of realism and that broadcasting encouraged Anand in his attempt to pair modernism's cosmopolitanism and polyvocality with realism's speed, engagement, even ephemerality. Challenging the often feeble distinction between realism and modernist anti-representational technics, Anand's radio writing captures the contradictions of combined but uneven development
Aesthetics · Art · Cosmopolitanism · Epistemology · Immediacy · Literature · Modernism (music · Political science · Realism · Social realism · Sociology · Universalization · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Australian History and Society · Irish and British Studies · Law · Philosophy · Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.38 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2018 - 2020 (3) |
| Highly cited | No |