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?
no subject
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?