∎ Libro Gratis Masscult and Midcult Essays Against the American Grain New York Review Books Classics Dwight Macdonald John Summers Louis Menand 9781590174470 Books

Masscult and Midcult Essays Against the American Grain New York Review Books Classics Dwight Macdonald John Summers Louis Menand 9781590174470 Books

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Masscult and Midcult Essays Against the American Grain New York Review Books Classics Dwight Macdonald John Summers Louis Menand 9781590174470 Books

If you are interested in the literature, politics and history of the USA from the 1930's through the 1960's , you've probably heard of Dwight Macdonald. However, I suspect if you're under 70 you probably haven't read him. Well if you haven't, you are missing out on something. At his best Macdonald was a perceptive and very funny critic.The title essay here is probably his most famous work.Here he lays out the once well known theory of culture as divided into roughly four spheres.Once there was high culture and low or folk culture and that was it.The industrial age gives birth to mass culture and gradually midculture. Mid cult is the hardest to define.I would suggest it's mass cult with pretensions.This stratification of art has everything to do with - in Walter Benjamin's terminology- the rise of mechanical reproduction of art, sound and the image.(Macdonald cites Adorno but not Benjamin).How valid is any of this? As an analytical tool ,I think this type of categorization is useful, if you don't take it too literally.It can function as an antidote to the overdone tendency to blur high and low to such an extent that , there can be no high or low in analyzing art.Yes, distinguishing Bach from Beyonce does have to be done because if you don't , you're lost.On certain specific points Macdonald is simply wrong.To give a striking example, he sees jazz as a somewhat vital holdout from folk culture but dismisses rock as masscult.Well, yes and no.Rock had much deeper roots in both rural and urban folk culture than Macdonald understood.Also while he was still alive rock was rushing headlong in the direction of midcult and at times playing with highcult. Refreshingly,Macdonald is blithely dismissive of art as validated by noble sentiment or good intentions.In what has routinely come to be called the"Post Modern" Age, this may all seem rather quaint.In truth , it's much more;it's a well deserved slap in the face.

To my surprise , the title easy takes up only a small portion of this volume.There's a good essay on James Agee , who Macdonald seems to have understood very well.While I think he overrates Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, he acknowledges that some of it is badly written.I prefer A Death In The Family but Macdonald is absolutely correct in pointing out its alternation between the sublime and the boring.It's been over 30 years yet I can still remember reading these absolutely stunning passages followed by extended , raw tedium.The essay on Hemingway is funny and probably very unfair, ditto Cozzens , who I know next to nothing about.I wonder if Macdonald were still alive and lucid if he would still have such a low opinion of Mortimer Adler and his ilk?They are Macdonald 's victims in another essay.The essay on the Revised Standard Version of the Bible is a sharp assault on modernist vulgarity.

What may be the best essay in the book is, The Triumph of the Fact.It is not an attack on facts but on the brain dead exaltation of data over theory that so appeals to us , corrupts and misleads us into saying ridiculous things like, just let the facts speak for themselves.Which reminds me of GEICO commercials(your money belt would shake your hand but it can't it doesn't have any hands).The worst essay is an attack on the early Tom Wolfe .Macdonald seems to be incensed that Wolfe wrote a mocking attack on The New Yorker.The piece in question as I remember it is quite funny and was probably unfair and in some ways inaccurate.There is nothing wrong in Macdonald criticizing it but he goes on and on.This is a unique essay in the sense that it is not only wrong headed but boring.Macdonald is totally blind to Wolfe's talents as a writer , which are substantial.Well , we all get some things wrong and it's surprising after so much sparkle to be confronted by such dull grousing . However,I think what Macdonald gets right is of greater importance.This volume may be somewhat dated but there is still life in the old critic yet.


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Masscult and Midcult Essays Against the American Grain New York Review Books Classics Dwight Macdonald John Summers Louis Menand 9781590174470 Books Reviews

I first read Dwight Macdonald's title essay when it was new in the 60s. At the time it made quite an impression, because it made the reader feel like part of an intellectual elite. "I can discuss this with you," the author seems to say, "because you, unlike more common folk, will understand." That was appealing to an uppity teen-ager; but on this second reading, I'm not so keen.

My main objection to the essay "Masscult and Midcult" is that it makes no serious contribution to our understanding of the nature of Art. That is, of course, an enormous subject; but what we have here is 68 pages of bluster, supported by tendentious examples. I won't try to review Macdonald's arguments; they are so vague that I'm not even quite sure what they are. At bottom we have his view that "high culture" is good, "mass culture" is mostly bad--with exceptions for things he likes--and that "midcult," composed of things that pretend to be high culture but aren't really, is even worse. When it comes to examples, he makes almost no mention of Shakespeare, who was about as masscult as they come.

The other essays in this collection are of less interest to the present-day reader. I was disappointed in the one on the Revised Standard Bible, which consists entirely of comparisons of lines from the King James Version with their more prosaic versions in the RSB. Naturally Macdonald prefers King James, but he ignores the real point of the comparison whether it is better to have a beautiful bible, or one that people can easily understand. In the other essays one wades through a lot of backbiting, reflecting struggles between rival--and largely forgotten--public intellectuals of the 1960s. These are not of much interest today.

So why do I still give this reprint three stars? Well, the title essay may be worthless, but it is fun to read. And it does make one think, if only to disagree. Surely, any book that makes one ponder the question "What is Art?" can't be all bad. This is an ideal book for book clubs! And I propose to their leaders the following discussion question Is Dwight Macdonald mid-cult himself?
Great Dwight McDonald stuff -- the only critic, by the way, to review the massive OED, Oxford English Dictionary. [In the New Yorker]
Great!
The classic. Learn to separate the junk from the genius?
A great analysis of how American culture has declined through the attempt to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
If you are interested in the literature, politics and history of the USA from the 1930's through the 1960's , you've probably heard of Dwight Macdonald. However, I suspect if you're under 70 you probably haven't read him. Well if you haven't, you are missing out on something. At his best Macdonald was a perceptive and very funny critic.The title essay here is probably his most famous work.Here he lays out the once well known theory of culture as divided into roughly four spheres.Once there was high culture and low or folk culture and that was it.The industrial age gives birth to mass culture and gradually midculture. Mid cult is the hardest to define.I would suggest it's mass cult with pretensions.This stratification of art has everything to do with - in Walter Benjamin's terminology- the rise of mechanical reproduction of art, sound and the image.(Macdonald cites Adorno but not Benjamin).How valid is any of this? As an analytical tool ,I think this type of categorization is useful, if you don't take it too literally.It can function as an antidote to the overdone tendency to blur high and low to such an extent that , there can be no high or low in analyzing art.Yes, distinguishing Bach from Beyonce does have to be done because if you don't , you're lost.On certain specific points Macdonald is simply wrong.To give a striking example, he sees jazz as a somewhat vital holdout from folk culture but dismisses rock as masscult.Well, yes and no.Rock had much deeper roots in both rural and urban folk culture than Macdonald understood.Also while he was still alive rock was rushing headlong in the direction of midcult and at times playing with highcult. Refreshingly,Macdonald is blithely dismissive of art as validated by noble sentiment or good intentions.In what has routinely come to be called the"Post Modern" Age, this may all seem rather quaint.In truth , it's much more;it's a well deserved slap in the face.

To my surprise , the title easy takes up only a small portion of this volume.There's a good essay on James Agee , who Macdonald seems to have understood very well.While I think he overrates Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, he acknowledges that some of it is badly written.I prefer A Death In The Family but Macdonald is absolutely correct in pointing out its alternation between the sublime and the boring.It's been over 30 years yet I can still remember reading these absolutely stunning passages followed by extended , raw tedium.The essay on Hemingway is funny and probably very unfair, ditto Cozzens , who I know next to nothing about.I wonder if Macdonald were still alive and lucid if he would still have such a low opinion of Mortimer Adler and his ilk?They are Macdonald 's victims in another essay.The essay on the Revised Standard Version of the Bible is a sharp assault on modernist vulgarity.

What may be the best essay in the book is, The Triumph of the Fact.It is not an attack on facts but on the brain dead exaltation of data over theory that so appeals to us , corrupts and misleads us into saying ridiculous things like, just let the facts speak for themselves.Which reminds me of GEICO commercials(your money belt would shake your hand but it can't it doesn't have any hands).The worst essay is an attack on the early Tom Wolfe .Macdonald seems to be incensed that Wolfe wrote a mocking attack on The New Yorker.The piece in question as I remember it is quite funny and was probably unfair and in some ways inaccurate.There is nothing wrong in Macdonald criticizing it but he goes on and on.This is a unique essay in the sense that it is not only wrong headed but boring.Macdonald is totally blind to Wolfe's talents as a writer , which are substantial.Well , we all get some things wrong and it's surprising after so much sparkle to be confronted by such dull grousing . However,I think what Macdonald gets right is of greater importance.This volume may be somewhat dated but there is still life in the old critic yet.