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Title |
Audiorealism: A Narrative Aesthetics of Taiwan Radio Novel |
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Author |
Chang, Yu-Ju |
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Ph.D. Candidate, Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature, National Chengchi University |
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Abstract |
Until radio broadcasting was invented as a new type of modern communication, the contemporary world just began to consider how to form representations and narratives only by mediated sounds. There was no exception to Taiwan. During the golden age of radio, broadcasters and writers in Taiwan were also striving to explore the potential and the usages of sound in the making of a purely auditory world on the air. One of their successful productions, the radio novel, showed the ways in which literature and radio mutually shaped each other. Due to the invisibleness and abstractness of sound, this paper argues that an aesthetic logic of “audiorealism” widely pervades both the radio medium itself and radio novel’s production and distribution. On this base, this paper studies why literature, especially the novels, enter the realm of radio, how the novels transform from written words into radio sounds, and what the interrelationship is amongst print culture and auditory culture. Once the mid-20th-century Taiwanese novel is situated in the contexts of radio sound narratives and auditory culture, we will find the signature features of this literary genre not only reflect specific historical experience or ideology, but also echoes the currently developing medium and its methods of narration. |
