Greg M. Nielsen

Digitize This: Public Broadcasting and the Montreal Radio Drama Project (1930–1969)

This article makes the case for digitalizing archives related to broadcasting history and speculates on the advantage the creation of a future online archive would have for access and multidisciplinary research. It describes a set of Montreal radio dramas and situates them in the larger paper archive containing Canadian English Language Radio Drama produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and predecessors between 1931 and 1968. It also provides a sociological description of the centralization process that occurred in the history of Canadian literary production and the cultural norms that are assumed to be “natural” when regional and urban cultural producers prepare dramatic creations for a national audience.

Two countries, one state, two social imaginations: Seriocomedy in Canadian and Quebec public cultures

This article reports on ongoing studies of political satire in the seriocomedy genre produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and its French language counterpart, la Societe Radio‐Canada (SRC). We compare and contrast examples of each networks way of imagining its respective society as well as each others society. We situate the definition of seriocomedy in a discussion of the contrasting role of private and public broadcasting in the North American context. Then we present examples from programs produced in two historical periods. The definition of seriocomedy and the analysis of texts follows the dialogical theory of discourse developed by the Russian thinker, Mikhail Bakhtin. In the conclusion, we discuss how these examples of dialogical criticism help demonstrate the complex process in which the seriocomedy genre expands and reinstitutes the normative boundaries of what can be said or represented in public culture.