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A New York Review Books Original An uncompromising contrarian, a passionate polemicist, a man of quick wit and wide learning, an anarchist, a pacifist, and a virtuoso of the slashing phrase, Dwight Macdonald was an indefatigable and indomitable critic of America’s susceptibility to well-meaning cultural fakery: all those estimable, eminent, prizewinning works of art that are said to be good and good for you and are not. He dubbed this phenomenon “Midcult” and he attacked it not only on aesthetic but on political grounds. Midcult rendered people complacent and compliant, secure in their common stupidity but neither happy nor free. This new selection of Macdonald’s finest essays, assembled by John Summers, the editor of The Baffler, reintroduces a remarkable American critic and writer. In the era of smart, sexy, and everything indie, Macdonald remains as pertinent and challenging as ever.
A New York Review Books Original An uncompromising contrarian, a passionate polemicist, a man of quick wit and wide learning, an anarchist, a pacifist, and a virtuoso of the slashing phrase, Dwight Macdonald was an indefatigable and indomitable critic of America’s susceptibility to well-meaning cultural fakery: all those estimable, eminent, prizewinning works of art that are said to be good and good for you and are not. He dubbed this phenomenon “Midcult” and he attacked it not only on aesthetic but on political grounds. Midcult rendered people complacent and compliant, secure in their common stupidity but neither happy nor free. This new selection of Macdonald’s finest essays, assembled by John Summers, the editor of The Baffler, reintroduces a remarkable American critic and writer. In the era of smart, sexy, and everything indie, Macdonald remains as pertinent and challenging as ever.
Concepts and Choices is a new approach to teaching writing, one that incorporates recognized concepts and techniques with some neglected ones and some entirely new ones. The assumption is made that extensive practice without attending to such concepts provides nothing more for students than the opportunity for frequent repetition of error. Therefore, this book calls for smaller, manageable units of instruction. In addition, the so-called "process" model of writing used extensively by teachers today has emphasized the "discovery" of arguments (neglecting almost entirely descriptive/narrative writing) at the expense of more important elements, including the quality of content. Writing is a complex activity that cannot be reduced to an analogy in which it is compared to an assembly line at a factory. Good writing indeed requires a rigorous apprenticeship, one that goes beyond a few hours a day in a classroom. This book attempts to provide a guide to good writing.
The literary 'middle ground', once dismissed by academia as insignificant, is the site of powerful anxieties about cultural authority that continue to this day. In short, the middlebrow matters . These essays examine the prejudices and aspirations at work in the 'battle of the brows', and show that cultural value is always relative and situational.
An Inquiry Into American Popular Culture And The Role Of The Middlebrows In The Distortion Of Cultural Values.
Since its birth in the 1960s, the study of popular culture has come a long way in defining its object, its purpose, and its place in academe. Emerging along the margins of a scholarly establishment that initially dismissed anything popular as unworthy of serious study-trivial, formulaic, easily digestible, escapist-early practitioners of the discipline stubbornly set about creating the theoretical and methodological framework upon which a deeper understanding could be founded. Through seminal essays that document the maturation of the field as it gradually made headway toward legitimacy, Popular Culture Theory and Methodology provides students of popular culture with both the historical context and the critical apparatus required for further growth. For all its progress, the study of popular culture remains a site of healthy questioning. What exactly is popular culture? How should it be studied? What forces come together in producing, disseminating, and consuming it? Is it always conformist, or has it the power to subvert, refashion, resist, and destabilize the status quo? How does it differ from folk culture, mass culture, commercial culture? Is the line between "high" and "low" merely arbitrary? Do the popular arts have a distinctive aesthetics? This collection offers a wide range of responses to these and similar questions. Edited by Harold E. Hinds, Jr., Marilyn F. Motz, and Angela M. S. Nelson, Popular Culture Theory and Methodology charts some of the key turning points in the "culture wars" and leads us through the central debates in this fast developing discipline. Authors of the more than two dozen studies, several of which are newly published here include John Cawelti, Russel B. Nye, Ray B. Browne, Fred E. H. Schroeder, John Fiske, Lawrence Mintz, David Feldman, Roger Rollin, Harold Schechter, S. Elizabeth Bird, and Harold E. Hinds, Jr. A valuable bibliography completes the volume.
The Invention of Taste provides a detailed overview of the development of taste, from ancient times to the present. At the heart of the book is an intriguing question: why did the sensory attribute of human taste become a social metaphor and aesthetic value for judging cultural qualities of art, fashion, cuisine and other social constructions? Unique amongst the senses, taste is at once a biologically derived sense, private, personal and individual, yet also a sensibility which can be acquired, shared, and communicated. Exploring the many factors that defined the evolution of taste – from medieval morals and medicine to social and cultural philosophy, the rise of aesthetics, birth of fashion, branding trends, and luxury worship in the age of mass consumption – Luca Vercelloni's ambitious text provides readers with an outstanding introduction to the subject, making it the cultural history of taste. Now available for the first time in English, Taste features a new final chapter and a preface by series editor David Howes. Rich in detail and examples, this interdisciplinary work is an important read for students and researchers in sensory studies, philosophy, sociology and cultural studies, as well as gastronomy, fashion, design, and branding.
The postwar period in America witnessed a tremendous consumer boom that introduced thousands of new items into the mass market. The contributors to Containing America challenge our conceptions of Cold War culture by examining a range of such products - clothes, food, television, magazines, radio, and other forms of entertainment - in order to shed light on how Cold War discourses actually influenced the practices of ordinary behaviour. Their essays address very different sectors of American society - in terms of race, class, ethnicity, sexuality and gender - thus emphasising the multiplicity, diversity, and differing nature of the voices that emerged in cultural production and consumption during the 1950s. Containing America points out directions for further research and provides a fresh approach for scholars, students, and others interested in the culture of the Cold War of the 1950s.
The future of the city worldwide.