Title: Highbrow / Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America
Author: Lawrence W. Levine
Year of Publication: 1988
Thesis:
What was popular culture in the early 19th century became high culture in the 20th (Shakespeare as case study) U.S. This puts into question the rigid boundaries around "high" and "low" culture, especially as Levine notes a great deal of pluralistic art culture toward the late 20th century. Constant shifting of the boundaries of cultural hierarchies, is what he finds. Attitudes of pushback from advocates of preserving an elevated culture, such as Allan Bloom, mirror arguments within the historical fields to maintain attention on elite and largely political histories vs. attention toward the democratizing (and therefore threatening) effects of studying history from the bottom up.
Time: 19th-20th centuries
Geography: U.S.
Organization:
Acknowledgments
Prologue
- Shakespeare was popular entertainment (now considered "high" culture) (4)
- Critiques erroneous critiques that denigrate popular audiences of Shakespeare for only understanding the crudeness (5)
- Shakespeare popular in U.S. 19th century - changes to high culture in 20th (6)
- Argues we should consider how fluid cultural demarcations are
One - Wiliam Shakespeare in America
Two - The Sacralization of Culture
Three - Order, Hierarchy, and Culture
Epilogue
- Pluralistic culture developing in the late 20th
- Also a counter-pluralistic angst - Artists rejecting shifts such as colorization of black & white films, etc. (249) Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind (249-50)
- Interesting intersection between classicists' idea of culture and the anti-presentist strain in history (quotes Bloom - "the good old Great Books approach, in which a liberal education means reading certain generally recognized classic texts, just read- ing them, letting them dictate what the questions are and the method of approaching them-not forcing them into categories we make up, not treating them as historical products, but trying to read them as their authors wished them to be read") (251)Notes
Index
Type:
Methods:
Sources:
Historiography:
Keywords:
highbrow
middlebrow
lowbrow
popular
mass
Themes:
Critiques:
Questions:
How do we describe the difference in the cultural pluralism where musicians share and relate to one another across genre, but the people who interpret their music do so by rigid classification?
Quotes:
On Americans retaining a colonial cultural mentality
"The idea that Americans, long after they declare their political independence, retained a colonial mentality in matters of culture and intellect is a shrewd perception that deserves serious consideration." (2)
On conflating culture and hierarchy / examining hierarchy perceived as attack on culture
"More troubling was the tendency to equate the notion of culture with that of hierarchy so that to examine closely the manner in which the hierarchy of culture was erected, or to challenge the reasoning behind the hierarchy's parameters, was translated al- most inevitably into an attack on the idea of culture itself. Cultural categories, which no one seemed able to define with any real precision, became fixed givens that one could be skeptical of only at the price of being accused of uncritical democratic rela- tivism." (7)
Central Argument - cultural demarcations always shifting
"One of the central arguments of this book is that because the primary categories of culture have been the products of ideologies which were always subject to modifications and transfor- mations., the perimeters of our cultural divisions have been permeable and shifting rather than fixed and immutable." (8)
Central Argument - share culture in the early 19th century
"in the nineteenth century, especially in the first half, Americans, in addition to whatever specific cultures they were part of, shared a public culture less hierarchically organized, less fragmented into rela- tively rigid adjectival boxes than their descendants were to experience a century later." (9)
On the arrogance of a elitist perception of culture:
"There is, finally, the same sense that culture is something created by the few for the few, threatened by the many, and imperiled by democracy; the conviction that culture cannot come from the young, the inexperienced, the untutored, the marginal; the belief that culture is finite and fixed, defined and measured, complex and difficult of access, recognizable only by those trained to recognize it, comprehensible only to those qualified to comprehend it" (252)
Ralph Ellison on the caricaturization of Black people - this is fantastic and reminds me of this poem I wrote (the idea was obviously around already):
More than two decades ago the novelist Ralph Ellison worried that the chance for empathy and identification with those of other backgrounds was being "blasted in the interest of specious political and philosophical conceits." Those writers and scholars who constructed "prefabricated Negroes," which they then superimposed upon the black community, Ellison maintained, were shocked and even indignant "when someone thrusts his head through the page and yells, 'Watch out there, Jack, there're people living under here.'" (256)
Notes:
Shakespeare festival makes an effort to contextualize his plays for a modern-day audience.
This reminds me of several discussions I've had - thinking Coos Bay on the hill & a more recent one on the violin vs. the fiddle.