Timothy C. Campbell, Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Abstract

Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi is not for the faint of heart. Author Timothy C. Campbell’s interesting theory of Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi’s impact on poetry, aesthetics, and writing at the turn of the 20th century can get lost in 170-plus pages of dense writing and analytical asides. This in no way is meant to slight the scholarly contribution of Campbell, an assistant professor of Italian at Cornell University, which is considerable. But if you are looking for a readable narrative along the lines of Tom Lewis’s 1991 Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio, you will not find it here. In Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi, Campbell argues that current media theory employing the term radio is too general. Instead, his intent “is to outline a possible media system to which the wireless belongs” (p. 70). The term wireless “is more precise to the degree it names not only the telegraph Marconi invented in 1895 but also the series of couplings and interfaces over a thirty-year arc” (p. xiv), the period that his analysis covers. The book contains five chapters, of which the first, “Marconi, Marconistra: The Birth of Radiotelegraphy,” offers the best historical grounding of the period. In this chapter, Campbell argues that “instead of interpreting the string of dots and dashes spit out by the telegraph’s Morse machine, the wireless operator hears a string of weak signals over a headset and determines which are meaningful” (pp. 2–3), a theme to which he returns frequently. Here he looks at Marconi biographies and how they present the “cultural reception afforded the invention” (p. 13) of the telegraph. The other four chapters are devoted to close readings of major figures and works of the era, including Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio (chapter 2), F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist manifestos (chapter 3), Ezra Pound’s Cantos (chapter 4), and Pound’s Radio Rome broadcasts (chapter 5). Although these chapters are rich in textual detail, that richness can also be a diversion, leading even the author to catch himself, for instance, with “But let’s return to entropy and the wireless” (p. 88) or “For reasons that will be clear shortly” (p. 44). In places, Campbell’s analysis is both clear and compelling. For instance, in his chapter on Marinetti’s Futurist manifestos he writes about