Radio’s vernacular modernism: the schedule as modernist text

This article explores the modernism of pre-war radio in terms of the framing device of the schedule, rather than exceptional texts or ‘features’. It suggests the flow of broadcasting could be experienced as a montage of remediations that invited reflexive engagement with the conditions and contradictions of modernity. The schedule thus appears not only as a site for the mediation of modern experience and a new sensorium, but as a modernist text in its own right that produced, and was expressive of, a pervasive and insistent vernacular modernism.