Word: midcult
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
...explanation for this failure might be that Mr. MacDonald has not entirely extricated himself from "the agreeable ooze of the Midcult swamp." The great, vaulting middlebrow sin is inaccuracy borne of shallow generalization (itself generally the result of ignorance); and this sin Mr. MacDonald freely, even joyfully commits. His first essay was full of misty historical-sociological speculations on High Culture and Mass Culture; his second though not as abundant in middlebrow historiography is still decidedly fertile. One longish quotation will suffice: "The turning point in our culture was the Civil War, whose aftermath destroyed the New England Tradition almost...