Middlebrow

Last updated February 12, 2024

The term middlebrow describes middlebrow art, which is easily accessible art, usually popular literature, and middlebrow people who use the arts to acquire the social capital of "culture and class" and thus a good reputation. First used in the British satire magazine Punch in 1925, the term middlebrow is the intellectual, intermediary brow between the highbrow and the lowbrow forms of culture; the terms highbrow and lowbrow are borrowed from the pseudoscience of phrenology.^[1]

Modernism

In the mid 20th century, the term middlebrow became a pejorative usage in the modernist cultural criticism written by Dwight Macdonald, Virginia Woolf, and Russell Lynes, which pejorative usage placed popular culture at the margin of mainstream culture in favour of high culture.^[2] Culturally, the middlebrow sensibility appears as a forced and ineffective attempt at cultural and intellectual achievement by way of popular literature that emphasises emotional and sentimental connections, rather than intellectualism and an appreciation of literary innovation.^[3] In contrast, the philosophy of postmodernism readily perceives the cultural advantages of the perspective of the middlebrow person who is aware of and likes high culture, but effectively balances the aesthetic demands of high art with the cultural demands daily life in the world.^[4]

Virginia Woolf

In 1941, Virginia Woolf derided the middlebrow mentality in an un-posted letter to the editor of the New Statesman & Nation, concerning a radio broadcast that attacked the highbrows of British society as people intellectually detached from everyday life.^[5] The letter-to-the-editor was posthumously published in the essay collection The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942).^[6]^[7]

As a social critic, Woolf criticizes middlebrows as petty purveyors of highbrow culture for their own shallow benefit. Rather than select and read books for their intrinsic cultural value, middlebrow people select and read books they are told are the best books to read: "We highbrows read what we like and do what we like and praise what we like." Middlebrows are concerned with appearances, with how their social activities make them appear to the community, unlike the highbrows, the avant-garde men and women who act according to their commitment to the beauty and forms of art, and to values and integrity. Likewise, a lowbrow person is devoted to a singular interest, a person "of thoroughbred vitality who rides his body in pursuit of a living at a gallop across life"; and, therefore, the lowbrow are equally worthy of reverence, as they, too, are living for what they intrinsically know as valuable.

Instead of such social and intellectual freedom, the middlebrows are betwixt and between, people whom Woolf characterises as "in pursuit of no single object, neither Art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige." The middlebrow value system rewards quick gains through books already designated as 'Classic literature' and as 'Great literature', but never of their own choosing, because "to buy living art requires living taste." The critic Woolf concludes that the middlebrow class are culturally meretricious — a human condition less demanding than personal authenticity.

Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow

In the essay "Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow" (1949), Russell Lynes satirized Virginia Woolf's highbrow scorn for middlebrow people voiced in her editorial letter.^[8] Quoting Woolf and other highbrows, such as art critic Clement Greenberg, Lynes said that the subtle distinctions that Woolf found significant among the levels of brows were just a means of upholding an artificial cultural superiority over the popular culture consumed by the middlebrow and the lowbrow strata of society. Lyne specifically criticised Woolf's claim that the consumer products used by a person identified his and her socio-cultural stratum in society; in the letter, Woolf identified consumer products that, in her opinion, identified the user as a middlebrow person.

Lynes then distinguished the sub-levels of the intellectual brow and divided the middlebrow into the upper-middlebrow and the lower-middlebrow. The upper-middlebrow patronage of the arts makes possible the cultural activities of the highbrow stratum, such as museums, symphonic orchestras, opera companies, and publishing houses, which are administrated by members of the upper-middlebrow stratum. The lower middlebrow use the arts as a means of self-improvement (personal and professional) because they are "hell-bent on improving their minds, as well as their fortunes." Members of the lower-middlebrow stratum also live the simple, easy life offered in advertisements wherein "lower middlebrow-ism" was "a world that smells of soap." Lynes concludes that Woolf's social-class opinions as an intellectual delineate an intellectually perfect world without middlebrow people.

Later, in a Life magazine article, Lynes distinguished among the right foods and the right furniture, the right clothes and the right arts for lowbrow people, for middlebrow people, and for highbrow people. In American culture, Lynes’ explanation of the sociologic particulars of social capital and the distinctions of social class provoked much social insecurity among Americans, as they worried about how their favourite things determined their actual social class and cultural stratum.^[9]

Priestley's defence

As an intellectual, J. B. Priestley sought to create a positive cultural space for the concept of the middlebrow, which would be characterised by earnestness, friendliness, and ethical concern;^[10] and couched his defence of the middlebrow in terms of radio stations, praising the BBC Home Service for cosiness and plainness, a cultural space midway between the Light Programme and the Third Programme, "between the raucous lowbrows and the lisping highbrows [there] is a fine gap, meant for the middle or broadbrows . . . our homely fashion".^[11]

In the struggles and competitions among the intelligentsia for the attention of readers and to generate cultural capital, Virginia Woolf responded to Priestly's defence of the middlebrow by dubbing the BBC Home Service as "Betwixt and Between Company".^[12]

Masscult and Midcult

Dwight Macdonald's critique of middlebrow culture, "Masscult and Midcult" (1960), associated the modern industrial drive, away from specialization and the folk, with creating mass-market arts that render men, women, and children into anonymous consumers of the arts.^[13] In the U.S., highbrow culture is associated with specialization for the connoisseurs, while lowbrow culture entails authentic folk products made for specific communities, such as the working class. Masscult (mass culture) copies and manipulates both the high and the low traditions, with factory-created products, made without innovation or care, expressly for the market, "to please the crowd by any means", thereby creating an American society in which "a pluralistic culture cannot exist", wherein the rule is cultural homogeneity.

In contrast, Midcult (middle culture) came about with middlebrow culture, and dangerously copies and adulterates high culture, by way of "a tepid ooze of Midcult", which threatens high culture, with dramaturgy, literature, and architecture, such as Our Town (1938), The Old Man and the Sea (1952), and American collegiate gothic architecture.

The Middlebrow "pretends to respect the standards of High Culture, while, in fact, it waters them down and vulgarizes them." Macdonald recommended a separation of the brows, so that "the few who care about good writing, painting, music, architecture, philosophy, etc. have their High Culture, and don't fuzz up the distinction with the Midcult."^[14]

Marketed middlebrow

Oprah's Book Club and the Book-of-the-Month Club are middlebrow products marketed to deliver the classical and highbrow literature to the middle class.^[15] The middlebrow nature of Oprah's Book Club was highlighted when the novelist Jonathan Franzen, after his 2001 book The Corrections (0000) was selected as Oprah's book-of-the-month. Franzen publicly complained that the selection was inconsistent with his place in “the high art literary tradition” as distinct from "entertaining books,”^[16] though Franzen never used the term “middlebrow” during the kerfuffle and later claimed to not know what it meant.^[17] In a 1996 essay in Harper’s Magazine, Franzen lamented book clubs for "treating literature like a cruciferous vegetable that could be choked down only with a spoonful of socializing.''^[18]

In A Feeling for Books (1997), a history of the Book-of-the-Month Club, from its establishment in 1926 to the 1980s, before being entirely commercialised, Janice Radway said that middlebrow culture is not just a simulacrum of highbrow taste, but, instead, have distinctly defined themselves in defiance of avant-garde high culture.^[19]

Contemporary middlebrow

Slate Magazine suggests that the late 2000s and early 2010s could potentially be considered the "golden age of middlebrow art"—pointing to television shows Breaking Bad , Mad Men , The Sopranos and The Wire and novels Freedom , The Marriage Plot and A Visit from the Goon Squad . Slate also defines the films of Aaron Sorkin as middlebrow.^[20] Some argue that Slate itself is middlebrow journalism.^[21]

In a March 2012 article for Jewish Ideas Daily , Peodair Leihy described the work of poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen as "a kind of pop—upper-middle-brow to lower-high-brow, to be sure, but pop nonetheless."^[22] This aesthetic was further theorized in an essay from November that year for The American Scholar that saw William Deresiewicz propose the addition of "upper middle brow," a culture falling between masscult and midcult. He defined it as, "infinitely subtler than Midcult. It is post- rather than pre-ironic, its sentimentality hidden by a veil of cool. It is edgy, clever, knowing, stylish, and formally inventive."^[23]

In The New Yorker , Macy Halford characterizes Harper's Magazine and The New Yorker itself as "often [being] viewed as prime examples of the middlebrow: both magazines are devoted to the high but also to making it accessible to many; to bringing ideas that might remain trapped in ivory towers and academic books, or in high-art (or film or theatre) scenes, into the pages of a relatively inexpensive periodical that can be bought at bookstores and newsstands across the country (and now on the Internet)." She also notes the internet's effect on the middlebrow debate: "Internet is forcing us to rethink (again) what "middlebrow" means: in an era when the highest is as accessible as the lowest—accessible in the sense that both are only a click away ... —we actually have to think anew about how to walk that middle line." Halford describes Wikipedia: "...Wiki is itself a kind of middlebrow product" and links to this middlebrow entry "because it actually provides a smart summary."^[24]

Related Research Articles

The Bloomsbury Group—or Bloomsbury Set—was a group of associated English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists in the first half of the 20th century, including Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Vanessa Bell, and Lytton Strachey. This loose collective of friends and relatives was closely associated with the University of Cambridge for the men and King's College London for the women, and they lived, worked or studied together near Bloomsbury, London. According to Ian Ousby, "although its members denied being a group in any formal sense, they were united by an abiding belief in the importance of the arts." Their works and outlook deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality.

Jonathan Earl Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel The Corrections, a sprawling, satirical family drama, drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. His novel Freedom (2010) garnered similar praise and led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist". Franzen's latest novel Crossroads was published in 2021, and is the first in a projected trilogy.

The intelligentsia is a status class composed of the university-educated people of a society who engage in the complex mental labours by which they critique, shape, and lead in the politics, policies, and culture of their society; as such, the intelligentsia consists of scholars, academics, teachers, journalists, and literary writers.

Dumbing down is the deliberate oversimplification of intellectual content in education, literature, cinema, news, video games, and culture. Originated in 1933, the term "dumbing down" was movie-business slang, used by screenplay writers, meaning: "[to] revise so as to appeal to those of little education or intelligence". Dumbing-down varies according to subject matter, and usually involves the diminishment of critical thought by undermining standard language and learning standards, thus trivializing academic standards, culture, and meaningful information, as in the case of popular culture.

Oprah's Book Club was a book discussion club segment of the American talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, highlighting books chosen by host Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey started the book club in 1996, selecting a new book, usually a novel, for viewers to read and discuss each month. In total, the club recommended 70 books during its 15 years.

In a society, high culture encompasses cultural objects of aesthetic value, which a society collectively esteem as being exemplary works of art, and the intellectual works of literature and music, history and philosophy, which a society consider representative of their culture.

Elaine Showalter is an American literary critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and social issues. She influenced feminist literary criticism in the United States academia, developing the concept and practice of gynocritics, a term describing the study of "women as writers".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Highbrow</span> Word synonymous with intellectual

Used colloquially as a noun or adjective, "highbrow" is synonymous with intellectual; as an adjective, it also means elite, and generally carries a connotation of high culture. The term, first recorded in 1875, draws its metonymy from the pseudoscience of phrenology, which teaches that people with large foreheads are more intelligent. The term is deeply connected to hierarchical racial theories from the 19th century. The German physician, physiologist, and anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) argued "for human diversity alonglines of racial differences as evidenced by skulls shapes and measurements. [...] One metric of Blumenbachs classification was the line of the forehead, said to be higher among 'Caucasians' and lower among 'Mongolians' and 'Ethiopeans' and this is the origin of the still common usage of 'highbrow' and 'low brow' ".

Lowbrow, or lowbrow art, is an underground visual art movement that arose in the Los Angeles, California area in the late 1960s. It is a populist art movement with its cultural roots in underground comix, punk music, tiki culture, graffiti, and hot-rod cultures of the street. It is also often known by the name pop surrealism. Lowbrow art often has a sense of humor – sometimes the humor is gleeful, impish, or a sarcastic comment.

In society, the term low culture identifies the forms of popular culture that have mass appeal, often broadly appealing to the middle or lower cultures of any given society. This is in contrast to the forms of high culture that appeal to a smaller, often upper-class proportion of the populace. Culture theory proposes that both high culture and low culture are subcultures within a society, because the culture industry mass-produces each type of popular culture for every socio-economic class. Despite being viewed as characteristic of less-educated social classes, low culture is still often enjoyed by upper classes as well. This makes the content that falls under this categorization the most broadly consumed kind of media in a culture overall. Various forms of low culture can be found across a variety of cultures, with the physical objects composing these mediums often being constructed from less expensive, perishable materials. The phrase low culture has come to be viewed by some as a derogatory idea in and of itself, existing to put down elements of pop or tribal culture that others may deem to be "inferior."

Dwight Macdonald was an American writer, critic, philosopher, and activist. Macdonald was a member of the New York Intellectuals and editor of their leftist magazine Partisan Review for six years. He also contributed to other New York publications including Time, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Politics, a journal which he founded in 1944.

Gilbert Vivian Seldes was an American writer and cultural critic. Seldes served as the editor and drama critic of the seminal modernist magazine The Dial and hosted the NBC television program The Subject is Jazz (1958). He also wrote for other magazines and newspapers like Vanity Fair and the Saturday Evening Post. He was most interested in American popular culture and cultural history. He wrote and adapted for Broadway, including Lysistrata and A Midsummer Night's Dream in the 1930s. Later, he made films, wrote radio scripts and became the first director of television for CBS News and the founding dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

Lowbrow may refer to:

Russell Lynes was an American art historian, photographer, author and managing editor of Harper's Magazine.

<i>I Lost It at the Movies</i> 1965 book by Pauline Kael

I Lost It at the Movies is a 1965 book that serves as a compendium of movie reviews written by Pauline Kael, later a film critic from The New Yorker, from 1954 to 1965. The book was published prior to Kael's long stint at The New Yorker; as a result, the pieces in the book are culled from radio broadcasts that she did while she was at KPFA, as well as numerous periodicals, including Moviegoer, the Massachusetts Review, Sight and Sound, Film Culture, Film Quarterly and Partisan Review. It contains her negative review of the then-widely acclaimed West Side Story, glowing reviews of other movies such as The Golden Coach and Seven Samurai, and longer polemical essays such as her largely negative critical responses to Siegfried Kracauer's Theory of Film and Andrew Sarris's Film Culture essay "Notes on the Auteur Theory, 1962". The book was a bestseller upon its first release, and is now published by Marion Boyars Publishers.

The sociology of literature is a subfield of the sociology of culture. It studies the social production of literature and its social implications. A notable example is Pierre Bourdieu's 1992 Les Règles de L'Art: Genèse et Structure du Champ Littéraire, translated by Susan Emanuel as Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1996).

Peter Swirski is a Canadian novelist, scholar, and literary critic featured in Canadian Who's Who. He is the author and editor of 19 nonfictions, including the prize-winning Ars Americana, Ars Politica (2010) and the staple of American popular culture studies From Lowbrow to Nobrow (2005). His other studies include American Utopia and Social Engineering (2011), American Political Fictions (2015), American Utopia: Literature, Society, and the Human Use of Human Beings, and the digital-futurological bestseller From Literature to Biterature (2013). He is also the leading authority on the late writer and philosopher Stanisław Lem.

<i>From Lowbrow to Nobrow</i> Book on literary culture

From Lowbrow to Nobrow is a book on literary culture written by Peter Swirski, professor of American literature and culture at the University of Missouri, St. Louis and Research Director at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. Swirski is the author of twelve books of American literature and culture, Stanislaw Lem, and theory of knowledge.

Perry Meisel, Professor of English at New York University for over forty years until his retirement in 2016, has written on literature, music, psychoanalysis, theory, and culture since the 1970s. His articles have appeared in The Village Voice, The New York Times Book Review, Partisan Review, October, The Nation, The Atlantic, and many other publications. His books include The Myth of Popular Culture from Dante to Dylan, The Literary Freud, The Cowboy and the Dandy, The Myth of the Modern, The Absent Father, and Thomas Hardy: The Return of the Repressed. He is co-editor, with Haun Saussy, of Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, and co-editor, with Walter Kendrick, of Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey, 1924–25. He is also editor of Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays. He received his B.A., M. Phil, and Ph.D. from Yale.

"Why Bother?", originally published as "Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels", is a literary essay by American novelist Jonathan Franzen. It is often referred to as "The Harper's Essay". First published in the April 1996 issue of Harper's magazine, the essay concerns the persistence of reading within the context of technological growth and distraction. Franzen recounts his meditations on the state and possibility of the novel form, often against the backdrop of his personal experience, eventually concluding that the novel still has potential cultural agency in the United States, and often gains it by paradoxical drives of both culture and author.

References

↑ "Middlebrow". Oxford English Dictionary. 23 February 2008.
↑ Pask, K. The Fairy Way of Writing (2013) p. 125.
↑ "Is "Middlebrow" Still an Insult?". Slate. 12 October 2011.
↑ Cardiff, David. Mass Middlebrow Laughter' Media, Culture and Society 10 (1988), 41-60
↑ H. Lee, Virginia Woolf (1996) p. 634.
↑ Woolf, Virginia (1942). "Middlebrow". The Death of the Moth, and Other Essays. London: Hogarth Press.
↑ "Woolf Contra Middlebrow – HiLobrow". hilobrow.com.
↑ Lynes, Russell (1954). The Tastemakers . New York: Harper.
↑ Rubin, Joan Shelley (1992). The Making of Middlebrow Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0807820105.
↑ B. Driscoll, The New literary Middlebrow (2014) p. 40
↑ Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy (1957) p. 185.
↑ M. Cuddy-Keane, Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere (2014) pp. 21–29
↑ Macdonald, Dwight (1962). "Masscult and Midcult". Essays Against the American Grain . New York: Random House.
↑ Collected (16 October 2008). The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprah's Book Club. SUNY Press. p. 136. ISBN 9780791476161.
↑ Kelly, Hillary (25 May 2011). "We Don't Need Oprah's Book Club". The New Republic.
↑ Kirkpatrick, David D. (29 October 2001). "'Oprah' Gaffe by Franzen Draws Ire and Sales". The New York Times.
↑ Kellaway, Lucy (9 October 2015). "Lunch with the FT: Jonathan Franzen". Financial Times. Retrieved 6 June 2023.
↑ Franzen, Jonathan (April 1996). "Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels" (PDF). Harper’s Magazine. Archived (PDF) from the original on 24 April 2023.
↑ Radway, Janice. A Feeling for Books: The Book-Of-The-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire.
↑ "You Can't Handle the Truth About Aaron Sorkin". Slate. 22 June 2012.
↑ Has Slate Declined? Archived 5 November 2011 at the Wayback Machine
↑ "Old-New Leonard". Jewish Ideas Daily. 9 March 2012.
↑ Deresiewicz, William (4 November 2012). "Upper Middle Brow".
↑ Halford, Macy (10 February 2011). "On "Middlebrow"". The New Yorker .The New Yorker