| Popis: |
This chapter uses the case of Wiltshire farmer-author A. G. Street, whose successful 1932 memoir Farmer’s Glory launched him into broadcasting, to examine the way that accent and dialect passing between media unsettled and reinscribed the BBC’s hierarchies of sound. Street’s broadcasts were larded with references to and choice quotations from ‘the generic, and usually anonymous Wiltshire labourer’ to whom he looks, he says, as ‘guide, philosopher and friend.’ On the pages of the Listener these quotations are rendered in written dialect, standing out from the smooth expanse of Street’s standard English prose. Street’s interaction with the dialect form refers us back to the original circumstances of broadcast, to the fact that that Street himself ‘does’ all the voices, dropping in and out of a broad Wiltshire that was never his own. Yet the orthography of the rendered speech presents it as an authentic ‘artifact,’ a nugget of regionality served up for appreciation. Throughout the 1930s such typifying and nostalgic versions of dialect—a version of what Elizabeth Outka termed the commodified authentic—effectively displaced ‘real’ regional voice in the journal’s pages. |
