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Topic: Middlebrow

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	Salon \| Middlebrowbeaten
		The middlebrow culture that drew Macdonald's ire, virtually institutionalized through cultural endeavors like the Book of the Month Club and Alexander Woolcott's "Town Crier" radio show, seems in recent years to have vanished from the American landscape almost entirely, along with such other remnants of mid-century kitsch as Andy Hardy movies and Norman Rockwell.
		But middlebrow has been so thoroughly excoriated by its various critics -- from Macdonald, who looked with curmudgeonly disdain upon the "tepid ooze" of "Midcult," to Virginia Woolf, who denounced each of its representatives as a "bloodless and pernicious pest" -- that the term itself is hardly ever used anymore.
		I've always scoffed at middlebrow's more sanctimonious manifestations, from the self-congratulatory prattle of PBS pledge weeks to William Bennett's dogged parade of virtues.
	www.salon.com /march97/middlebrow970311.html (314 words)

	Reason
		Middlebrowism, which dominated mid-century culture in the Anglo-American world, can be a complex subject beset by issues of status and social power, but at its heart lay the duty of all educated persons to become "well-rounded" citizens, especially by exposing themselves to great ideas, great art, and great literature.
		Middlebrow adherents, in their attempts at achieving well-roundedness, often spread themselves notably thin, listening to, say, Third Stream Jazz, attending exhibits of Abstract Expressionism, watching enigmatic Bergman movies, sitting through eventless Beckett plays, etc.
		As I've argued elsewhere, the precipitous decline in middlebrow culture is in large measure a function of technological innovation, which has had the effect of redrawing culture's sociological map.
	www.reason.com /links/links101603.shtml (1078 words)

	Joe Strauss to Joe Six-Pack - New York Times
		The middlebrow impulse in America dates at least to Ralph Waldo Emerson and the belief that how one spends one's leisure time is intensely important.
		Middlebrow culture was killed in the late 50's and 60's, and the mortal blows came from opposite directions.
		Clement Greenberg called the middlebrow an "insidious" force that was "devaluing the precious, infecting the healthy, corrupting the honest and stultifying the wise." Dwight Macdonald lambasted the "tepid ooze" of the Museum of Modern Art and the plays of Thornton Wilder.
	www.nytimes.com /2005/06/16/opinion/16brooks.html?ei=5090&en=ac30f1a386a6ebae&ex=1276574400&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print (720 words)

	Number 2 Pencil: The missing middlebrow
		For all its flaws, [middlebrow culture] nurtured at least two generations’ worth of Americans who, like me, went on to become full-fledged highbrows—but highbrows who, while accepting the existence of a hierarchy of values in art, never lost sight of the value of popular culture.
		The catch was that the middlebrow culture on which I was raised was a common culture, based on the existence of widely shared values, and it is now splintered beyond hope of repair.
		One can argue that the middlebrow culture can be expanded to include other information not emphasized in the past, but in my mind, the intelligentsia do a poor job of explaining why fl children should learn more about Malcolm X than George Washington or Shakespeare.
	www.kimberlyswygert.com /archives/001448.html (708 words)

	Middlebrow (n) (Udolpho)
		Middlebrow (n)… A person whose tastes are elevated above the crudest and cheapest aspects of popular culture, but not high enough to diminish his incuriosity and smugness.
		Above all else the middlebrow seeks comfort in the form of near-constant reminders that it is possible to remove all difficulty and challenge from life.
		The first middlebrow to encounter a lowbrow or highbrow thought (by mistake, usually) simply transmutes it, using his unique mental conformity, into a middlebrow idea, then communicates this mangled notion to his fellow middlebrows, who react with delight.
	www.udolpho.com /weblog/?id=00968&title=Middlebrow-n (494 words)

	Modernism
		Middlebrow readers were upwardly-mobile modernists who based their reading choices on the divergent authority of professional book reviewers.
		Indeed, the term "middlebrow" itself emerged in the 1920s as readers from the professional managerial class sought to demonstrate their connection to "culture." "Oriented always to the gaze and assessment of others," (Radway 283) middlebrow subjects were constantly concerned about their "cultured" appearance.
		Middlebrow readers could thus feel confident that the texts they purchased were approved by a group of literary experts as literature.
	www2.potsdam.edu /mausdc/class/112/modernism.html (1867 words)

	Believer Books
		In his latest collection of essays, critic and author Nick Hornby continues the feverish survey of his swollen bookshelves, offering funny, intelligent, and unblinkered accounts of the stuff he’s been reading.
		Ranging far and wide from the middlebrow, Hornby’s dispatches from his nightstand serve as invaluable guides to contemporary letters, with revelations on the intellectual scene and English football in equal measure.
		Printed monthly in the Believer, Hornby’s book reviews are suffused with wit, ire, and loving insight, and his choices often strike into the deeper, odder reaches of the literary world.
	books.believermag.com (1151 words)

	OUP: UK General Catalogue (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-09)
		'Middlebrow' has always been a dirty word, used disparagingly since its coinage in the mid-1920s for the sort of literature thought to be too easy, insular and smug.
		Yet it was middlebrow fiction - largely written and read by women - that absolutely dominated the publishing market in the four decades from the 1920s to the 1950s.
		Investigating the nature of the feminine middlebrow and its readers, the author considers its variously radical and conservative remakings of ideas of class, the home, the family and gender.
	www.oup.com /uk/catalogue/?ci=9780198186762 (471 words)

	Research Universities, Periodical Publication, and the Circulation of Professional Expertise: On the Significance of ...
		What they sold to their educated general readers in the form of summaries and handbooks was the assurance that they could keep up with the bewildering pace of evolving knowledge about the modern world.
		Use was important to middlebrow authorities because, as literary entrepreneurs, their work depended on the viability of marketing appeals that could explain to potential consumers how they might benefit from the purchase of books, magazines, or other cultural materials.
		What ensued, once middlebrow authorities began to elaborate their own arguments for the use-value of culture, was a struggle over the authority to pronounce on the role of literature in the world.
	www.uchicago.edu /research/jnl-crit-inq/features/artsstatements/arts.radway.html (9127 words)

	Left Center Left: Demise of Middlebrow (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-09)
		Maybe because the third chapter of the diss is on middlebrow culture, I found the David Brooks piece today a worthy read.
		Amanda at Pandagon – who otherwise makes the excellent point that Brooks may be overstating the shift, that we in fact have a vibrant middlebrow today – misreads these paragraphs as an argument that the nefarious liberal elite is the problem for everything.
		At least in my dissertation, I have a tentative answer for the social problem film (middlebrow genre exemplar): its decline in the 1960s had everything to do with a breakup in the alliance of highbrow and middlebrow audience segments.
	leftcenterleft.typepad.com /blog/2005/06/demise_of_middl.html (1538 words)

	Grant Abstract
		My research investigates the emergence of a religious middlebrow in America by examining the content, marketing, readership, and distribution of mass-market religious non-fiction in the period 1920-1960.
		The term “middlebrow” has been employed by scholars in American cultural history to describe the new cultural forms that emerged when “high culture” was marketed to a growing, socially-anxious American middle-class seeking to “better” itself.
		The emerging religious middlebrow of the second quarter of the 20th century mediated previously marginal ideas—in particular, modern psychology, New Thought religion, and Christian mysticism—into the wider, middle-class reading culture, and thereby shaped later-twentieth-century spirituality.
	www.louisville-institute.org /secondary/abstract.asp?id=2889 (415 words)

	2blowhards.com: Will Middlebrow Ever Return? (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-09)
		Most of the so-called common truths of middlebrow culture are simply not correct, and yet are endlessly repeated as if true.
		I thought that in the classic position (maybe never fully realised), the middlebrow think pieces were watered-down, popularised versions of what the real intellectuals were thinking, middlebrow art recycled the cutting-edge highbrow art of five or ten years earlier or imposed dumbed-down interpretations on the canonical highbrow stuff.
		The point is, middlebrow fractures and loses its hegemony after, and because, highbrow does the same thing.
	www.2blowhards.com /archives/001658.html (1299 words)

	Commentary Magazine - On the Horizon: Middlebrow England (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-09)
		...Thus it makes some sense to say that Chaucer was a middlebrow, whereas the French romancers and allegorists who gave him many of his ideas were highbrow, just as one might say that Pascal was a highbrow and Montaigne a middlebrow...
		...Amis's as- 1 sumptions are middlebrow and if, furthermore, they sometimes seem to speak with the voice of the future, one may want to ask whether his particular brand of middlebrowism is importable to America...
		...To be sure, the kinds of taste and attitude which one associates268 COMMENTARY istic middlebrow task of bringing the higher formalities and abstractions of art into a new relation with ordinary experience, with the personal, the temperamental, and the domestic...
	www.commentarymagazine.com /Summaries/V22I3P77-1.htm (4065 words)

	Commentary Magazine - Battle of the Brows (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-09)
		...The word "middlebrow" has for so long been used by cultural radicals and intellectuals as a term of abuse that it is difficult to see through to the forgotten reality...
		...And while the middlebrow's respect for culture may be too pious and undifferentiated, it has worked to save the traditional facilities of culture-the printed word, the concert, lecture, museum, etc.from that complete debauching which the movies, radio, and television have suffered under lowbrow and advertising culture...
		...The earnest, self-improving middlebrow consumer is likewise increasingly a thing of the past, wandering helplessly between the mindlessly outre products of the so-called high culture and the wasteland of an electronic-era mass culture that is "debauched" (to use Greenberg's word) to a degree unimaginable in the 1950's...
	www.commentarymagazine.com /Summaries/V102I4P62-1.htm (2109 words)

	Antholog - Middlebrow
		The origin of the word is that it is a descendent of the turn-of-century coinages "highbrow" and "lowbrow," which almost certainly would have brought to mind the contemporary phrenological ideas.
		But there's also something slyly elitist about it, as if the ability to call something "middlebrow" required one to be sitting in the "highbrow" position.
		At any rate, I read a pretty interesting blog post about comics that addressed some of my objections to the word's usage but also raised a whole new set of questions.
	www.antholog.com /article.php?story=200602271203576 (308 words)

	The Hindu : Literary Review / Columns : Why we need Woody Allen
		This middlebrow sensibility is the strongest connection we have with him.
		This, of course, is a caricature of the cultural aspirations of a middlebrow but that's what Woody Allen is all about.
		The comic absurdity of existence, the middlebrow's humiliation of being constantly mocked by everyday reality in his or her quest for a meaningful life — we've all been victims of this.
	www.hindu.com /lr/2006/03/05/stories/2006030500270600.htm (974 words)

	I Am NOT The Beastmaster: More Browbeating
		Focusing on Woolf's essay alone may cast "middlebrow" as an irredeemably elitist concept, but the term's many different applications seem most united by their common disgust at the middlebrow work of art as a lie.
		J.W.'s piece, with its thesis that any criticism of the middlebrow is inescapably prejudiced against the common folk, is far more troubling because it comes perilously close to the argument that any negative judgment about mass culture, regardless of its criteria, is tantamount to elitism, an attack on the audience as well as the work.
		I suppose I prefer "middlebrow" - in certain very specific circumstances - to "pretentious" because it's more complete and concise, capturing not only the pretension but also something of what the work or critic is pretending to, and their ultimate failure to meet their own standards.
	notthebeastmaster.typepad.com /weblog/2004/05/more_browbeatin.html (2136 words)

	Middlebrow - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
		If there was a Ministry of Middlebrow, the commissar would be Andrew Lloyd Webber, with various posts filled by, in no particular order, John Grisham, Thomas Kinkade and Michael Flatley.
		Middlebrow culture came of age in the '40s and '50s.
		Middlebrow should not be confused with popular culture.
	pittsburghlive.com /x/tribune-review/s_419535.html (1254 words)

	Great Ideas for the General Public - New York Times
		Even in the best of worlds, to engage fully with great art is a formidable challenge; but readers used to the easy pleasures of a James Michener may be rendered incapable thereby of ever recognizing that an Edith Wharton demands more of them -- and offers more as well.
		As Joan Shelley Rubin notes in her absorbing study "The Making of Middlebrow Culture," Will and Ariel Durant's middlebrow "Story of Civilization" started many young readers on the road to distinguished careers in history.
		Rubin with the curricula vitae of these "merchants of light" -- most of whom, famous in their day, are now all but forgotten -- that her book often seems in imminent danger of degenerating into a series of biographical sketches.
	query.nytimes.com /gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE1DB1731F931A25757C0A964958260 (502 words)

	The UNC Press, The Making of Middlebrow Culture by Joan Shelley Rubin (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-09)
		Joan Rubin here provides the first comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon, the rise of American middlebrow culture, and the values encompassed by it.
		Rubin centers her discussion on five important expressions of the middlebrow: the founding of the Book-of-the-Month Club; the beginnings of "great books" programs; the creation of the New York Herald Tribune's book-review section; the popularity of such works as Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy; and the emergence of literary radio programs.
		She also investigates the lives and expectations of the individuals who shaped these middlebrow institutions--such figures as Stuart Pratt Sherman, Irita Van Doren, Henry Seidel Canby, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, John Erskine, William Lyon Phelps, Alexander Woollcott, and Clifton Fadiman.
	uncpress.unc.edu /books/T-1281.html (222 words)

	Two cheers for the middlebrow by Mark Steyn
		The standard criticism of the middlebrow is that it gives you the intimation of great art but also the illusion that great art is easy.
		he best thing about middlebrow art is its ability to seize something complex and mysterious and identify something grippingly human about it.
		Now “middlebrow” means a film-school graduate riffing on Elvis or Abba or gangsta rap.
	www.newcriterion.com /archive/18/02-00/steyn.htm (2791 words)

	AmericanHeritage.com / Highbrow, Lowbrows, Middlebrow, Now
		They are not pretending to be somebody else, as middlebrows are.
		For upper middlebrow, Charles Ives, whom hardly anyone had heard of at the time of the original chart, even though he did his composing early in the century.
		I think lower middlebrow would still be the ranch house, in a curious way; when people want to build a house, they want a house one story high with a peaked roof.
	www.americanheritage.com /articles/magazine/ah/1983/4/1983_4_42.shtml (3711 words)

	Pete Lit: Oprah and the Middlebrow
		Julia Keller--who is probably the most insightful literary writer the Tribune has, although her essays inexplicably never appear in the Books section--incisively takes Oprah to task for abandoning the enjoyable "middlebrow" fiction of living, breathing authors in favor of the "classics" by the deceased greats.
		The great unsung glory of Winfrey's original book club was its celebration of middlebrow literature, of authors such as Sue Miller, Wally Lamb and Maeve Binchy.
		"Middlebrow" is a vague term, an imprecise one, but most people have an instinctive understanding of its meaning: Books that are written to be read, books for which you grieve if you inadvertently leave them behind on your way out the door.
	boogaj.typepad.com /pete_lit/2005/06/oprah_and_the_m.html (541 words)

	Consciousness
		Humble is therefore eager to demonstrate that defining the parameters of the ‘middlebrow’ is more problematic, as it largely depends upon the standpoint of the reader and the way in which they interact with the text.
		In short, the value of middlebrow writing, for Humble, is that it at once constituted and was constituted by the cultural forces of a growing proportion of the population, by both inspiring and reflecting shifts in middle-class ideologies.
		Even middlebrow fiction retained an element of escapism as it clung to the Victorian themes of the solid bond of marriage and the joy of having large families at a time when the divorce rate was rising steadily and the average family were having just two children!
	www.aber.ac.uk /cla/archive/humble.html (1031 words)

	Amazon.com: Cold War Orientalism : Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961: Books: Christina Klein (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-09)
		middlebrow intellectuals, war orientalism, ethnicity paradigm, middlebrow culture
		Finally, Klein contends that the "middlebrow imagination" conflated education with enjoyment and moral purpose, ironically couching human difference in the trappings of soothing universalism.
		Both envision an Asian communism that is rabidly expansionist and interstitial states that teeter on the verge of being "lost" or safely preserved in the bloc of the free world through cultural understanding (Klein 126).
	www.amazon.com /exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0520232305?v=glance (1465 words)

	Easily Distracted » Blog Archive » Middlebrow Video Game Criticism
		I mean Sin Episodes isn’t reallly noteworthy aside from the fact that it is episodic in nature, but that doesn’t mean that a reviewer can’t take it to task for its horrible depiction of women or examine the corporate-controlled society that it puts forward.
		I agree that almost any game could be reviewed–after all, bad movies get reviews all the time, and are deemed bad in middlebrow criticism for all sorts of reasons, including their content or possible impact on audiences.
		But if I were going to start trying to invent a distinctive game-review “voice”, I think I’d want to start with the games that I find most interesting, both interesting to me as a gamer and potentially worth knowing about even for people who rarely or never play games.
	weblogs.swarthmore.edu /burke/?p=209 (3355 words)

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