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sophia_sol) wrote2018-03-26 08:57 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2018-03-26 08:57 pm
Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, by Lawrence W. Levine
This is one of those nonfiction books that helpfully tells you in the title exactly what it's going to be about.
It was interesting to read for the historical details of what was going on in the arts scene in 19th century USA! But I felt like the author chose the wrong time period to begin his discussion. The book's thesis: during the 19th century in the USA, there was greater cultural sharing between the classes, but as the 19th century ended and the 20th century began, it became more stratified into ideas of certain things being highbrow ~art~ and other things being low-value popular entertainment.
But the book also makes it clear that this kind of cultural stratification existed in Europe in the 19th century during the time he's saying the USA was more unified. And US culture of the time, as a colonial country, is obviously influenced by the colonizing culture. So what was going on in the US before the 19th century? And did Europe also have a time of more cultural sharing between classes, and just went stratified earlier than the US did? Where did the perspectives of the early 19th century come from?
I feel like this is relevant in the discussion, especially since the author's epilogue says that culture is once again moving in a direction of being less stratified. (The author was writing in the 1980's, ftr.) So is it a cyclical thing? Or was one perspective or the other an unusual historic one-off?
The author is totally uninterested in these broader contextual questions. He's interested in an approximately 100 year span of history in a single location and that's it. Which like, sure, he can restrict himself like that if he wants, but I'm also allowed to be annoyed that his book isn't more comprehensive on the topic he's discussing.
Also, through much of the book he was talking in quite definitive tones about the way everything was at one time vs the other with little room for, like, natural human variety even in the face of a social trend. Which put me off and made me spend most of the book trying to find ways to argue against the author's thesis.
I don't know enough to be able to argue one way or another, and the author is certainly right that there were changes over the course of 19th century USA in how the expected relationship between art and audience goes, but overall I'm left not feeling as convinced by this book as I want to be -- and as, perhaps, I ought to be, since the author is likely right about broad trends even if those trends are not universal.
It was interesting to read for the historical details of what was going on in the arts scene in 19th century USA! But I felt like the author chose the wrong time period to begin his discussion. The book's thesis: during the 19th century in the USA, there was greater cultural sharing between the classes, but as the 19th century ended and the 20th century began, it became more stratified into ideas of certain things being highbrow ~art~ and other things being low-value popular entertainment.
But the book also makes it clear that this kind of cultural stratification existed in Europe in the 19th century during the time he's saying the USA was more unified. And US culture of the time, as a colonial country, is obviously influenced by the colonizing culture. So what was going on in the US before the 19th century? And did Europe also have a time of more cultural sharing between classes, and just went stratified earlier than the US did? Where did the perspectives of the early 19th century come from?
I feel like this is relevant in the discussion, especially since the author's epilogue says that culture is once again moving in a direction of being less stratified. (The author was writing in the 1980's, ftr.) So is it a cyclical thing? Or was one perspective or the other an unusual historic one-off?
The author is totally uninterested in these broader contextual questions. He's interested in an approximately 100 year span of history in a single location and that's it. Which like, sure, he can restrict himself like that if he wants, but I'm also allowed to be annoyed that his book isn't more comprehensive on the topic he's discussing.
Also, through much of the book he was talking in quite definitive tones about the way everything was at one time vs the other with little room for, like, natural human variety even in the face of a social trend. Which put me off and made me spend most of the book trying to find ways to argue against the author's thesis.
I don't know enough to be able to argue one way or another, and the author is certainly right that there were changes over the course of 19th century USA in how the expected relationship between art and audience goes, but overall I'm left not feeling as convinced by this book as I want to be -- and as, perhaps, I ought to be, since the author is likely right about broad trends even if those trends are not universal.
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If you had told me you were limiting it that way I might not even have minded! But now I feel betrayed! I feel like there's a really bad titling trend among academics and their editors of late. The worst offenders have been archeology books that are titled like "Explaining This Broad Cultural Trend In This Long Time Period" and the contents are "we have written a very detailed study about two archaeological sites that were occupied for twenty years total and we make no attempts to generalize." I would totally read a book that was titled A Detailed Study Of These Two Archaeological Sites but that is not what I was promised!
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But I too would rather read A Detailed Study Of These Two Archeological Sites that is presented as such. But I guess such titles don't have broad marketability.
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I do have some books that are titled A Detailed Study Of These Archeological Sites but they're all fairly old.
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To stick firmly within this Modernist framework, we could say that the Modernists adopted/coopted various preceding artists as forebearers, and certainly that's true of Shakespeare- I was reading something a high school English teacher friend pointed out the other day, which is that no critic talked about the Oedipal dimension in Hamlet 150 years ago, and now when he teaches Hamlet, it's one of the first readings his high school seniors come up with. The contemporary way of understanding Shakespeare is, commonly, through a Modernist lens and that's one of the reasons why his work has a staying power today.
Another way of thinking about it is to ask the sort of more obvious question- Dickens is not Modernist, and was explicitly writing for the pre-bifurcation mass audience, and yet he's seen as high culture today. To me this is more of a problem than Shakespeare, but we can answer both in the same way. I challenge you to identity any work of literature more than a century old that still has staying power, but which migrated to the low culture rather than to the high culture. It's hard to do. I can think of a few weird or ambiguous examples, and I can think of a number of examples where the original work has gone high culture but faithful adaptations to the screen remain low culture- but by and large I think a possible answer is that anything old, because it requires a consumer to spend the time deciphering a foreign context, will inevitably migrate out of the low culture, by a different aesthetic process than the one that immediately codifies works adhering aesthetically to Modernism as 'literary'.
There are probably other approaches. Does Levine discuss Shakespeare at all?
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Levine does discuss Shakespeare, at length, but doesn't really make an effort to hypothesize why changes to ideas of highbrow/lowbrow culture happened, his main point was that changes happened at all. So going to Levine isn't much help in coming up with approaches for explanation.
Some other thoughts I have though on why Shakespeare is highbrow today, though:
In the 19th century there wasn't the same sense of ownership/copyright/inviolability-of-art, and people made very free with their Shakespeare to alter as they saw fit to make it more appealing to what was wanted at that time. Whereas today there's a tendency towards the way of thinking that changing an author's words would be sacrilege. (Helped along, probably, by corporate pressures on copyright shaping our culture's view on the ownership of art. Not that copyright is bad, but the hugely extended copyright period is pretty weird and honestly stifling.) So when you have the freedom to change a text to fit its context, it can have a broader appeal, perhaps.
Also the English language has changed a lot since Shakespeare's time, and the 21st century is far enough removed from the 19th century in terms of language usage that it makes an appreciable difference in how comprehensible Shakespeare is. So Shakespeare has to be high culture today because you have to be educated to be able to comfortably make sense out of what the characters are saying, when probably it was far more penetrable to someone 175 years ago.
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Nothing inherently stops them, but Shakespeare is one of the sets of texts that the Modernists DID do this with. Modernist readings of Shakespeare are littered throughout Joyce, Freud, Woolf, etc... Why this is the case probably requires an explanation, too, and I don't have a full aesthetic theory for that.
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