Word: middlebrows
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...watery historical analysis which so unnecessarily bloats his work). According to Mr. MacDonald there are three kinds of culture: 1. Lowbrow (including most movies, almost all television, Life, The Saturday Evening Post). 2. Highbrow (the paintings in art museums, most literature studied in universities, The Partisan Review). 3. Middlebrow (which, being the subject actually of his entire piece, will require a paragraph...
...half-century has been exposed to the same leveling process which has operated on other aspects of American society. A great legion of well-intentioned clods has materialized as a result. This is a legion that threatens to destroy any highbrow culture that remains in this country; for the middlebrow ruthlessly appropriates highbrow literature and cuts it to fit the well-worn grooves of his own mind. The middlebrow belongs to book clubs that describe the Iliad as "Homer's immortal masterpiece"; he thinks in terms of "truth" and "universals"; he reads The Saturday Review...
...this indeed is not all. Certain writers, some of them writers of great skill, have composed actual middlebrow works. MacDonald lists Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, John Brown's Body, The Old Man and The Sea, and, inevitably, J.B. The chief characteristic of middlebrow literature, he contends, lies in the presumptuous exploitation of certain shallow "universals...
...might even be tempted to say that Mr. MacDonald has not gone far enough; that he has concentrated upon some of the more obvious manifestations of the great unconscious middlebrow conspiracy, and left many of the more arcane, insidious attitudes unexamined, free to work upon his imperiled contemporaries...
...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...