Sight in the Sound: Seeing and Being Seen In The Lone Ranger Radio Show
2007; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 42; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wal.2007.0036
ISSN1948-7142
Autores Tópico(s)Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis
ResumoS i g h t in t h e S o u n d : S e e i n g a n d B e i n g S e e n in Th e L o n e Ra n g e r R a d i o S h o w C h a d w i c k A l l e n ANNOUNCER: Let us look in at the Lone Ranger camp. A surprising sight meets our eye. — The Lone Ranger radio show, November 7, 1934 Print and film texts dominate the field of western literary studies. Critics give occasional attention to drama and other live performance genres, such as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, as well as to television westerns and to nonfiction print texts by westerners or about the West, such as frontier diaries and contemporary memoir, or travel and environmental writing. But almost no critical attention has been directed toward texts produced for radio, even though radio was a dominant popular medium and radio drama was a pervasive popular genre in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, three decades scholars consider crucial to the development of “the Western” in the twentieth century. In fact, many literary scholars interested in popular Westerns may be surprised to learn that radio, as the first home-based electronic medium available in the United States, played a significant role in constructing a national sense of “America” and what it meant to be American (Hilmes, Introduction xii).1 Part of that construction involved retelling, reimagining, and inventing stories from America’s frontier past. During the three decades of radio’s prominence as a medium for drama, radio Western series performed literally thousands of individual half-hour episodes and thus produced an enormous body of western narratives and representations of western landscapes, peoples, societies, conflicts, and personalities. This essay is meant to serve as a first step in making the argument that we will not fully understand the complex development of western American literature in the twentieth century nor the specific mechan ics of twentieth-century western literary allusion, intertextuality, and cross-media exchange until we take into account the production and popularity of radio Westerns and until we begin the large task of analyz ing the various “juvenile” and “adult” Western radio series— everything W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L i t e r a t u r e 42.2 (S u m m e r 2007). 117-40. W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 7 from The Lone Ranger, the particular focus of this essay, Red Ryder, The Cisco Kid, Hopalong Cassidy, and The Roy Rogers Show to Gunsmoke, Tales of the Texas Rangers, Fort Laramie, Frontier Gentleman, and Have Gun, Will Travel. The inclusion of radio is likely to force us to rethink basic assumptions about the history of twentieth-century Westerns; among other things, the typical divisions used to organize print and film Westerns into chronological periods, such as pre- and post-World War II, will not easily accommodate long-running radio serials such as The Lone Ranger or Gunsmoke. And perhaps more significant, an under standing of the distinctiveness of radio technology and of the particular conventions and aesthetics of radio drama is likely to force us to reex amine the impact of form and media on the Western genre. In the sec tions that follow, I pursue two avenues in beginning this research: First, I introduce key technological and aesthetic elements that distinguish radio drama from other media and other genres in order to open a space for the inclusion of radio Westerns in the broader study of twentiethcentury western American literature. And second, I offer an analysis of a specific technological and aesthetic operation of the classic Western radio series The Lone Ranger in order to demonstrate the potential of lit erary study of radio Westerns to inform our understandings of narrative conventions and their potential impact on specific audiences. A S o u n d F o...
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