![]() During this time, middlebrow culture developed across the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and other countries, and was inevitably inflected by these different national contexts. The word emerged to complicate the binary between highbrow and lowbrow in the early-to-mid twentieth century, a period when critics were confronted by both the emergence of Modernism and the increased production of mass culture. This middle space is not a value-free zone, and analyzing it requires robust conceptual resources, one of which is the middlebrow.ĭefining the middlebrow has always been contentious. Yet while these extreme examples persist, one of their chief effects is to highlight a large middle space where much cultural activity takes place. Think of the widely expressed contempt for the mega-selling erotica novel Fifty Shades of Grey (2011), about which Salman Rushdie stated, "I've never read anything so badly written that got published." 7 Consider, also, the respect given to those elite cultural producers, the winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. So many cultural conversations rely on a framework of value, oriented by exemplars of high and low culture. It seems to activate contradictory impulses: both resistance and attraction, both a denial of cultural hierarchy and a claim for position within that hierarchy. One of the authors I reviewed wrote that the term middlebrow "implies an arrested capacity for aesthetic assessment, it implies an unrefined judgment of taste " 5 another tweeted "Don't just reject the label middlebrow doesn't exist." 6 Others, however, saw my review as an insult to the authors, to readers, or to both. 4 Many people were intrigued by my description of middlebrow culture, suggesting some public interest in the burgeoning academic field of middlebrow studies. The review, which highlighted the books' powerful storytelling, poetic language, intriguing moral questions, and humor, concluded that "ome of the pleasures of these novels are middlebrow, all of them contribute to a vibrant Australian culture of books and reading." 1 The reaction to this review included more than 500 tweets, a combined 4500-word response from the three authors, 2 an article in The Guardian with 187 comments, 3 and several posts on book blogs. In October 2015, I wrote a piece for the Sydney Review of Books that considered three Australian novels and their participation in both literary and middlebrow practices of publishing and reading.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |