This essay examines John Hersey’s 1946 report, Hiroshima, as a piece of cultural production that aimed to resist and rearrange the hegemonic narrative surrounding the first-ever use of atomic weapons by the United States—that narrative being that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was warranted and righteous. I argue that the decisions made regarding the reportage, publication, and circulation of Hiroshima aimed to set the record straight regarding the impact of the atomic bombings. In this way, Hiroshima participated in rewriting history even as the metaphorical dust from the nuclear fallout was still in the process of settling (or being sifted) into a coherent narrative by powerful voices in US government and media.
Hersey’s text performed an antiwar function by acting in direct opposition to the US government’s policy of censorship, instead exposing to its citizens (and the broader global public) the breathtakingly destructive impact of the atomic bomb on citizens of Hiroshima. Furthermore, as a work of journalism that employed distinctly literary techniques for aesthetic effect, Hiroshima complemented its informational, antiwar censorship function by concurrently offering an antiwar aesthetic experience designed to dismantle key elements of US pro-war propaganda.
Writing History
The dominant narrative of the bombings was pro-war because it depicted the military’s use of atomic weapons on an enemy nation as purposeful, successful, and moral. We can think of the solidification of the hegemonic narrative of the bombing as taking place according to these steps:
- The initial justification was put forth by the state, as communicated by President Truman via radio broadcast,
- The state’s official explanation was then publicized and reiterated by a media infrastructure hamstrung by censorship rules,
- The general public’s acceptance of the official version of events was used as further justification for the official story,
- And this account was reinforced in and by the academic community largely responsible for producing the historical record of the events.
As historian Sven Lindqvist notes in his 2000 book, A History of Bombing, Truman shaped the view of the atomic bombings as successful and merciful in his initial radio broadcast announcing the strike on Hiroshima:
A military base had been selected for the attack, [Truman] said, ‘because we wished in the first attack to avoid, as much as possible, the killing of civilians.’ But if ‘the Japs,’ as he called them, did not surrender, this consideration would soon have to be set aside, and ‘unfortunately, thousands of civilian lives would be lost.’
This left the impression that thousands of civilian lives had not been lost in Hiroshima. As Truman well knew, that was a lie.[1]
Former Secretary of State, Henry Stimson, added to the official government narrative of the atomic bombs as lifesaving, arguing in a Harper’s article that the purpose of the atomic bombs was “not to kill but to save lives—the lives of 1-1.5 million Americans that it would have cost to invade Japan.”[2] Though this figure was completely fabricated, it was repeated until it was considered gospel. Other military leaders asserted, without evidence, that not only had lives been saved in comparison to a projected calculus of the death toll in a counterfactual scenario in which the Japanese did not surrender, but also that the A-bombs killed in a “pleasant” fashion.[3]
In order to successfully persuade Americans of the party line that the US use of atomic weapons on the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary and moral, a complementary narrative of Japanese people as barbarous and alien was simultaneously disseminated, the logic being that if the Japanese insisted on fighting to the last man, defeating them would mean exterminating them.[4] There is therefore a direct line from public acceptance of the racist characterization of the Japanese as barbarous and suicidal[5] to the acceptance of dropping atomic bombs on Japanese cities. Strategically graphic coverage of the battles of Tarawa and Guadalcanal starkly contrasted the censorship of images and details of the carnage caused by the atomic bombs.
Although the U.S. Office of Censorship shut down at the end of World War II, critical media coverage continued to be a rarity as “both Truman and the War Department discouraged public discussion of the bomb beyond what was contained in official releases, with Truman privately asking editors and broadcasters to self-censor.”[6] The same day that the Office of Censorship shuttered, the War Department released the following statement instituting a de facto censorship policy: “It is the duty of every citizen, in the interest of national safety, to keep all discussion of this subject [the atomic bomb] within the limits of information disclosed in official releases.”[7] Prominent newspaper columnist Stewart Alsop characterized the general attitude of the US public toward atomic energy at the time as “a sort of Victorian reaction to the whole subject,” buttoned-up and taboo, better not to be spoken about.[8] The dominant narrative formed by the government with the media’s cooperation and subsequently internalized by the US public was a societal view of atomic energy as inappropriate for public discussion, let alone criticism.
Initial public opinion, writes historian Michael Kort, was that “most Americans strongly supported President Harry S. Truman’s decision to use atomic weapons against Japan.”[9] War literature scholar Margot Norris puts US approval of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at 70-80%.[10] For the most part, initial historical accounts by academics largely followed suit. After Japan’s surrender, a combination of practices, including selectively releasing information, promoting disinformation, and totally censoring certain information continued to produce the dominant US narrative about the role of nuclear weapons in the war’s end. Journalism historian Kathy Roberts Forde summarized the dominant narrative about atomic power in 1945-46 as “shaped by official government sources that misleadingly portrayed Hiroshima and Nagasaki as military targets and withheld information about radiation sickness and other disturbing consequences of the bombings.”[11] That Hiroshima was consistently described (untruthfully) as a military target in fact evinces awareness on the part of US government and military leadership that the admission that the A-bomb had been targeted at a city would have been seen as wrong or at least inconsistent with a narrative of American exceptionalism, of the US as that “most peace-loving of nations.”[12] The same is true of the effects of radiation sickness: leadership felt the need to cover up its painful and deadly consequences so that the US would not seem as barbarous as it was portraying Japan to be.
Re-writing History
The narrative in Hiroshima begins moments before the bomb exploded at 8:15am on August 6, 1945, and proceeds to shift between the perspectives of six survivors as they navigate the decimated city in the hours and days to come. Making use of months’ worth of interviews with survivors in Hiroshima, Hersey brought the heretofore censored story of the physical, psychological, and material consequences of the first-ever use of a nuclear weapon to the American public. Working simultaneously at the level of counter-propaganda and anti-censorship, Hersey’s text employs a logic of American exceptionalism in order to respond to—and attempt a re-articulation of—conditions that allowed for US acceptance of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Put simply, Hiroshima presumed that its (primarily American) readers were smart and sensitive enough that a simple description of the situation in Hiroshima with a focus on a sympathetic cast of characters would be enough to change their thinking, in an antiwar direction.
I view Hiroshima as pushing for a potential restructuring of the emotional habitus of its present moment—that is, what it is possible to feel in a given historical moment[13]—by attempting to represent the impact of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima simultaneously on an individual, human level and on a grand scale. I see Hiroshima working to connect these perspectives via formal strategies including what literary scholar Caroline Levine has termed “the enormity effect,” which combines the tradition of the sublime and the realist novel’s formal use of character types in order to “imagin[e] a vast scale without actually representing the many” with the effect of “activat[ing] an ethical crisis through its glimpse of the vast extent of ordinary pain.”[14] In doing so, Hiroshima serves as a challenge to dominant feelings of acceptance of the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as the related distrust and difference toward the Japanese population fostered by state propaganda. If we think of art’s purpose being, in the oft-quoted words of literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky, “in order to give back the sensation of life, in order to make us feel things, in order to make the stone stony” with the goal of “creat[ing] the sensation of seeing, and not merely recognizing, things,” then we can understand Hiroshima functioning as a work of literature to bring Hersey’s audience not only the facts of the atomic bomb’s effects but also a fully felt sensation of what it was like to experience the blast.[15]
Hiroshima served most obviously as a purely informational exposé, providing accurate casualty estimates that functioned as counter-propaganda, correcting governmental reports that had lowballed the numbers of dead and wounded, and therefore pushing back against the erasure of the bombs’ massive (civilian) casualties. In his history of The New Yorker, journalism scholar Ben Yagoda echoes this point: “Hersey had for the first time established the number of casualties—100,000 dead and 100,000 wounded in a city of 245,000.”[16] Hiroshima describes Hiroshima as a civilian population center, correcting and pointing out the falsehood of the US government narrative, by making only brief mention of Japanese soldiers affected by the bomb and spending most of the text focused on civilian casualties.
Empathetic portrayals of hibakusha, or survivors of the atomic bomb, that Hiroshima profiles, also sought to counteract racist anti-Japanese state propaganda. Literary scholar Jocelyn Dupont argues that “Hersey consciously selected these survivors so that the Japanese voices found in the book would differ from the dominant stereotypes of the time.”[17] Similarly, literary scholar Patrick B. Sharp writes that Hersey’s six main characters were designed to “appeal to the pathos of the American audience, and…implicitly undermined the representation of the Japanese as a fanatical, militaristic Shinto horde.”[18] Choosing to profile six survivors rather than a single heroic figure does some of the work to show atomic bomb victims’ experience as multiple rather than monolithic, as does portraying each of the six as well-rounded and sympathetic characters, with identities beyond hibakusha: readers learn about their personalities, what they care about, what they were doing before the blast, the pain they experienced, and their selfless acts in the assistance of other survivors and the dead.
Literary scholar David Wyatt argues that, on the level of form, the active grammatical construction throughout Hersey’s report is a critique of the passive construction of government statements, such as Truman’s phrasing of the intentionally targeted bombing of civilians as a scenario in which “lives would be lost.”[19] Truman’s broadcast is quoted in Hiroshima, which suggests that Hersey sought to bring his report directly into conversation with it. Significantly, the portion of Truman’s announcement that Hersey includes in the report details the unprecedented destructive power of the A-bomb. Truman is quoted announcing: “That bomb had more power than twenty thousand tons of TNT. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British Grand Slam, which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.” Hersey writes that the hibakusha were “too busy or too weary or too badly hurt to care that they were the objects of the first great experiment in the use of atomic power.”[20] Hiroshima re-centers the reader’s focus on the actual suffering people as opposed to the state narrative, which characterized the bomb as a scientific breakthrough and spoke only of hypothetical lives.
Hiroshima’s descriptive imagery might seem like a familiar catalogue of the physical effects of atomic radiation to the 21st century reader. In 1946, however, they were among the very first descriptions of the kind. For instance:
The eyebrows of some were burned off and skin hung from their faces and hands. Others, because of pain, held their arms up as if carrying something in both hands. Some were vomiting as they walked. Many were naked or in shreds of clothing. On some undressed bodies, the burns had made patterns…Almost all had their heads bowed, looked straight ahead, were silent, and showed no expression whatsoever. (25-26)
Dupont reads the expressionlessness described in the above excerpt psychoanalytically, as symptomatic of trauma, and formally, as mirrored by Hersey’s flat prose, which is capable of evoking dread and guilt in its readers. Another description of immediate effects of radiation comes when one protagonist, Mr. Tanimoto, attempting to aid victims in crossing a river, “reached down and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glove-like pieces. He was so sickened by this that he had to sit down for a moment” (38). The literary quality of this description invites the reader to mimic Mr. Tanimoto’s sickened pause, something about the word choice adding to the horror of this imagery. The alliteration of “skin slipped” as opposed to, for example, the skin “fell” off or “came” off, perhaps, or the description of the skin as “glove-like,” which produces a feeling of the uncanny: hand skin is shaped like a glove, but it should not be removable like a glove, and it is the removal of the skin that produces horror, disgust, and maybe sympathy as well (I am most affected by this description because I too have hands that I am now imagining the skin slipping off of). Significantly, the narrative tells the reader how Mr. Tanimoto feels—sickened—departing from description of solely observable events.
Popularizing Re-Written History
Hiroshima was a one-of-a-kind publication in terms of not only its content but also its publication, reach and reception.[21] The original plan to run the report as a four-part series was scrapped in favor of issuing the first-ever single-story edition of The New Yorker. History of journalism scholar Mary F. Corey notes the ways in which Hersey’s narrative organization worked in tandem with the editorial decision to publish the piece as a full issue of The New Yorker to create a new kind of war literature:
Allowing the piece to… explode long-standing New Yorker formulaic constraints greatly magnified its moral force. What television news did for Vietnam, Hersey’s account did for atomic warfare. By delivering searing descriptions of how the bombing was experienced by six survivors…Hersey succeeded in raising the specter of American terrorism.[22]
Corey ties the textual descriptions to the essay’s longform publication, crediting both formal decisions with a widespread, deeply felt, and antiwar effect on its audience.
As the most popular of the more nuclear-skeptical magazines of its time, The New Yorker was a fitting publisher for Hersey’s report. Editorial leadership at The New Yorker saw Hersey’s essay as a corrective to complacent acceptance of the US use of nuclear weapons—that is, as a challenge to the dominant narrative at “the dawn of the atomic age.”[23] Editor-in-chief Harold Ross wrote to E.B. White that the idea to print “Hiroshima” as a standalone issue was “to wake people up,” which Editor-of-fact William Shawn believed was the duty of their magazine.[24] Corey also points out a concern shared among The New Yorker leadership regarding the danger of public ignorance about nuclear weapons: “White and his colleagues often expressed concern about the way people simply accepted the bomb as an inevitability,” while contributors “attributed lay men and women’s passive acceptance of an atomic future to a lack of awareness.”[25] It follows, then, that Hersey’s report was published in an attempt on the part of The New Yorker leadership to bring greater awareness of the bomb’s impact to their readers in the service of jolting them out of uncomplicated acceptance of nuclear weapons use. This was a direct counterattack on the dominant narrative that, as we determined in the previous section, was calculated to produce the public acceptance that The New Yorker leadership uncritically thought of as existing passively. An editorial note prefacing the essay read:
The New Yorker this week devotes its entire editorial space to an article on the almost complete obliteration of a city by one atomic bomb, and what happened to the people of that city. It does so in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon, and that everyone might well take time to consider the implications of its use.[26]
The note does not take an overtly antiwar position, but it does instigate a challenge to the official narrative by asserting that what an American audience knew about the atomic bombs was not the whole story. The descriptions of the bomb’s power as “destructive” and its effect as “obliteration” are strong rejoinders to a narrative of the bombings as merciful. The note, much like Hersey’s third-person omniscient narration of Hiroshima, backs off from any explicit antiwar content when it advises readers in a removed and euphemistic manner to think hard about the “implications” of nuclear weapons and does not make a value judgment regarding the atomic bomb or say that it should not have been used. Ultimately, the reliance on description rather than authorial or narrational interjections leaves the reader to form their own opinions, showing and not telling the effects of US militarism.
Hiroshima enjoyed such an expansive reach in part due to a highly unusual show of industry cooperation in the lead-up to its publication, Forde notes:
Various constituents of the commercial media market cooperatively underwrote the widespread circulation of a legally and politically risky report that served community and public interests more than commercial ones, at least in the short run. ‘Hiroshima,’ they believed, was required reading—a work of reportage that might even save the world.[27]
Hiroshima was subsequently circulated in various pop culture media: it was reprinted and reviewed in other newspapers; read in full as a four-night ABC radio broadcast; released as a book by Alfred Knopf publishers; and chosen for the Book-of-the-Month Club, through which it was provided to many readers free of charge in another of unusually cooperative actions by media industry leaders in service of disseminating the report to as wide an audience as possible.
The choice to reproduce Hiroshima in the popular media of radio and Book-of-the-Month Club is significant for its expansion, beyond the middlebrow audience of The New Yorker, of the potential for collectivity around Hersey’s report. Even if the act of reading or listening to the report may have been a solitary, individual experience, the reader/listener would nonetheless know that they were part of a multitude of reader/listeners absorbed in the same story.[28] For instance, communications and cultural studies scholar Janice A. Radway describes the Book-of-the-Month Club as having “fostered the definition of an imagined community of general readers” who were “understood to be captivated by books.”[29] The distribution of Hiroshima as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, then, was both premised upon and productive of a sense in readers of connection with fellow Americans in the discovery of the atomic bomb’s effects.
Conclusion
Hersey’s report served as counterpropaganda, urging a reassessment and, ultimately, a rejection of the hegemonic narrative of the atomic bomb. The political potential of the report as a work of anti-censorship that also challenged hegemonic narrative tenets such as anti-Japanese xenophobic disgust and paranoia was not agitational but pedagogical: it taught people who already wanted to consider themselves ethical, enlightened, and worldly to think differently about war than their government instructed them to. This does not diminish its political-affective capacity, its ability to articulate and deepen antiwar sentiment by evoking certain feelings in some segment of the US population. In this way, the production and publication of this sort of descriptive, informational, intimacy-inviting antiwar literature, I argue, can be considered an antiwar action, in large part due to its potential for influencing public mood.
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Churchill, Ward. On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003).
Corey, Mary F. World Through a Monocle: The New Yorker at Midcentury. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Dower, John W. War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (London: Pantheon, 1986).
Dupont, “The Violence of Hiroshima: Hersey, Bataille and Caruth,” Sillages critiques 22 (2017) 445. http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/4906
Forde, Kathy Roberts. “Profit and Public Interest: A Publication History of John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima.’” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 88, no. 3 (Autumn 2011): 562-579.
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John Hersey, “Hiroshima,” The New Yorker (August 31, 1946). https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima. Accessed 23 July 2019
–. Hiroshima (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946).
Kort, Michael. “Part 1: Historical Narrative.” The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
“Japanese in Suicide Attacks,” New York Times (1923-Current File), Mar 14, 1944. https://proxy.lib.wayne.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/107019817?accountid=14925. Accessed 22 Sept 2019.
Levine, Caroline. “The Enormity Effect: Realist Fiction, Literary Studies, and the Refusal to Count,” Genre 50.1 (April 2017) 59-75.
Lifton, Robert J. and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995) 10.
Lindqvist, Sven. A History of Bombing, trans. Linda Haverty Rugg (New York: The New Press, 2000).
Norris, Margot. Writing War in the Twentieth Century. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000.
Radway, Janice A. A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-class Desire (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
Sanders, David. John Hersey Revisited. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991.
Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Device,” from Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader, ed. & trans. Alexandra Berlina (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016) n.p.
Sharp, Patrick B. “From Yellow Peril to Japanese Wasteland: John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima.’” Twentieth Century Literature 46, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 434-452.
Smith, Jeffrey A. War and Press Freedom: The Problem of Prerogative Power. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Weart, Spencer R. The Rise of Nuclear Fear. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012.
Wyatt, David. Secret Histories: Reading Twentieth Century American Literature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010)
Yagoda, Ben. About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made (New York: Scribner, 2000).
Yavenditti, Michael J. “John Hersey and the American Conscience: The Reception of ‘Hiroshima,’” Pacific Historical Review 43, no. 1 (Feb. 1974) 24-49.
Biographical note: Kelly Roy Polasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in the English with a concentration in Literary and Cultural Studies at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Her research focuses on 20th and 21st century antiwar literature and aesthetic theory. Claims in this essay are expanded in a dissertation chapter tentatively titled “Describing Nuclear Fallout: John Hersey’s Hiroshima at the Dawn of the Atomic Age.” Kelly teaches in WSU’s Composition and Gender, Sexuality, & Women’s Studies programs and serves on the executive board of Wayne State’s Visual Culture Student Group.
[1] Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing, trans. Linda Haverty Rugg (New York: The New Press, 2000) 112.
[2] Quoted in Lindqvist 118.
[3] General Leslie R. Groves to Congress in 1945: “in fact, they say it [radiation sickness] is a very pleasant way to die”: quoted in Lindqvist 115 and by historian Michael J. Yavenditti in “John Hersey and the American Conscience: The Reception of ‘Hiroshima,’” Pacific Historical Review 43, no. 1 (Feb. 1974): 27.
[4] John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (London: Pantheon, 1986) 52.
[5] For example, a March 14, 1944 New York Times article began: “Five hundred Japanese hurled themselves into certain death upon the barriers in one sector before the American beachhead on Bougainville Island in the Solomons Saturday” in “repeated suicidal attacks” wherein the “Japanese knew no hope and had but one purpose—to kill as many Americans as possible before they died”: “Japanese in Suicide Attacks,” New York Times, Proquest (Mar 14, 1944). Accessed 22 Sept 2019.
[6] Kathy R. Forde, “Profit and Public Interest: A Publication History of John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima’” (Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 88, no. 3 [Autumn 2011]) 566.
[7] Jeffrey A. Smith, War and Press Freedom: The Problem of Prerogative Power (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 167.
[8] Quoted in Spencer R. Weart, The Rise of Nuclear Fear (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012) 68.
[9] Kort 5.
[10] Margot Norris, Writing War in the Twentieth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000) 181.
[11] Forde 565.
[12] Woodrow Wilson, quoted in Ward Churchill, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003) 39.
[13]Deborah Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2009).
[14] Caroline Levine, “The Enormity Effect: Realist Fiction, Literary Studies, and the Refusal to Count,” Genre 50.1 (April 2017) 62, 65.
[15] Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” from Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader, ed. & trans. Alexandra Berlina (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016) n.p.
[16] Ben Yagoda, About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made (New York: Scribner, 2000) 192.
[17] Jocelyn Dupont, “The Violence of Hiroshima: Hersey, Bataille and Caruth,” Sillages critiques 22 (2017) 445. http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/4906
[18] Sharp, Patrick B. “From Yellow Peril to Japanese Wasteland: John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima.’” Twentieth Century Literature 46, no. 4 (Winter 2000) 445
[19]David Wyatt, Secret Histories: Reading Twentieth Century American Literature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) 160-61.
[20] John Hersey, “Hiroshima,” The New Yorker (August 31, 1946). https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima. Accessed 23 July 2019 (emphasis added). Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text using pagination from the subsequently published book version of the report: John Hersey, Hiroshima (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946).
[21] “No other publication in the American twentieth century was so widely circulated, republished, discussed, and venerated as ‘Hiroshima’”: Forde 562-63.
[22] Corey 37.
[23] Initial reports from the Pentagon regarding the bombing of Hiroshima, released the next morning, August 7, 1945, referred to “the birth of a new age—The Age of Atomic Energy,” revealing the premeditated nature of the description of the bombing as a historical turning point: Robert J. Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995) 10.
[24] Quoted in Yagoda 183.
[25] Mary F. Corey, World Through a Monocle: The New Yorker at Midcentury (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999) 30.
[26] Quoted in Forde 567.
[27] Forde 564, emphasis added.
[28] Here, I am thinking of the ways in which newspapers—The New Yorker and local papers alike—build a sense of community between editorial staff and readers through the publication of letters to the editor, for example. My sense of the radio as a collectivizing medium is informed by Jonathan Flatley’s presentation on “Communist Headphones” at the Wayne State University Humanities Center Conference in April 2018.
[29] Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-class Desire (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1997) 7.