Word: masscult
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Gadgets Galore. The fact that James Bond has developed into the biggest masscult hero of the decade has given serious pause to such as Britain's Novelist Kingsley Amis who ranks Fleming "with those demigiants of an earlier day, Jules Verne, Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle"; and to Columbia's Jacques Barzun, who deplores "the studies by academic critics who have argued over Fleming's morals and philosophies...
...American Grain, a collection of essays written over the last ten years, Macdonald argues that American standards are threatened in a new and peculiar way. In times gone by, highbrow culture was clearly distinguished from lowbrow; today the two have been blurred by what Macdonald calls "Midcult." "In Masscult," he writes, "the trick is plain: to please the crowd by any means. But Midcult has it both ways; it pretends to respect the standards of high culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them...
...Fall Partisan Review has arrived, and with it Dwight MacDonald's second article on Masscult and Midcult. This is a theme dear to Mr. MacDonald's heart (as those who heard him speak in Harvard Hall last year will remember); it has the built-in advantage of immediately alienating a certain number of ineffectuals and of subtly flattering the educated majority; thus it is considered controversial. It also permits Mr. MacDonald to indulge in one of his greatest pleasures: insulting Archibald MacLeish...