Do Novels Dream of Electric Media? Radio Archives at the crossroad between media and narration

The essay explores the relationship between the novel and electric media by focusing on radio and its archives as a site where literary narration encounters a regime based on voice, listening, and synchronous temporality. Drawing on theories of orality (Havelock, Ong), media theory (McLuhan), and sound narratology (Crisell, Huwiler), the author interprets radio not merely as a vehicle for literary contents but as a medium that profoundly reshapes narrative forms, reactivating the acoustic and performative dimension of storytelling. Radio archives, conceived as devices of cultural memory, allow us to observe how core elements of the novel—narrating voice, diegesis, montage, temporality, and the construction of space—are translated, transformed, and in some cases reconfigured in broadcasting and radio drama. Through a dialogue with Brecht, Benjamin, Barthes, and Auerbach, the essay argues that the radio voice establishes a form of “secondary orality” that challenges the typographic primacy of the novel and reveals its historically mediated nature. Radio thus appears not as a mere technical support, but as a laboratory in which modern narrative experiments with the shift from page to sound flow, from written text to acoustic landscape, and from silent reading to a community of listeners.