Description:
For generations, fans and critics have characterized classic American radio drama as a "theater of the mind." This book unpacks that characterization by recasting the radio play as an aesthetic object within its unique historical context. In Theater of the Mind, Neil Verma applies an array of critical methods to more than six thousand recordings to produce a vivid new account of radio drama from the Depression to the Cold War.
In this sweeping exploration of dramatic conventions, Verma investigates legendary dramas by the likes of Norman Corwin, Lucille Fletcher, and Wyllis Cooper on key programs ranging from The Columbia Workshop, The Mercury Theater on the Air, and Cavalcade of America to Lights Out!, Suspense, and Dragnet to reveal how these programs promoted and evolved a series of models of the imagination.
With close readings of individual sound effects and charts of broad trends among formats, Verma not only gives us a new account of the most flourishing form of genre fiction in the mid-twentieth century but also presents a powerful case for the central place of the aesthetics of sound in the history of modern experience.
Brief description:
Neil Verma is a Harper Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts and a Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago.
Review Quotes: "Verma begins his ambitious and impres-sive book on classic radio drama with 'one of the most venerable clichés' about the medium of radio: it is 'the theater of the mind.' Over the course of several close listen-ings, he transforms the phrase from 'an idiom into a heuristic' of remarkable depth and breadth. In doing so, Verma provides a fresh vocabulary for thinking about classic ra-dio drama, with remarkable insights into the ways radio dramatists employed new strate-gies of sound design. . . . Verma's contribution to the growing shelf on U.S. radio history is significant for its un-precedented insight into the centrality of the aesthetics of sound in radio drama, its insight-ful close listening to exemplary broadcasts, and its sheer scope in encompassing thousands of broadcasts."-- "Journal of American History"