|
Middlebrow
The term middlebrow describes easily accessible art, usually literature, and the people who use the arts to acquire culture and "class" (social prestige). First used in the British satire magazine ''Punch'' in 1925, the term ''middlebrow'' is the intermediary "brow" descriptor between ''highbrow'' and ''lowbrow'', which are terms derived from the pseudoscience of phrenology. Modernism The term middlebrow became a pejorative usage in the modernist cultural criticism, by Dwight Macdonald, Virginia Woolf, and Russell Lynes, which served the cause of the marginalisation of the popular culture in favour of high culture. Culturally, the middlebrow is classed as a forced and ineffective attempt at cultural and intellectual achievement, and as characterizing literature that emphasises emotional and sentimental connections, rather than intellectual quality and literary innovation; although postmodernism more readily perceives the advantages of the middlebrow cultural-position that is awa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Highbrow
Used colloquially as a noun or adjective, "highbrow" is synonymous with intellectual; as an adjective, it also means elite, and generally carries a connotation of high culture. The term, first recorded in 1875, draws its metonymy from the pseudoscience of phrenology, which teaches that people with large foreheads are more intelligent. Applications "Highbrow" can be applied to music, implying most of the classical music tradition; to literature—i.e., literary fiction and poetry; to films in the arthouse line; and to comedy that requires significant understanding of analogies or references to appreciate. The term ''highbrow'' is considered by some (with corresponding labels as 'middlebrow' 'lowbrow') as discerning or selective; and ''highbrow'' is currently distanced from the writer by quotation marks: "We thus focus on the consumption of two generally recognised 'highbrow' genres—opera and classical". The first usage in print of ''highbrow'' was recorded in 1884. The term was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Russell Lynes
Russell Lynes (Joseph Russell Lynes, Jr.; December 2, 1910 – September 14, 1991) was an American art historian, photographer, author and managing editor of Harper's Magazine. Early life Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Lynes was the younger son of Adelaide Sparkman and Joseph Russell Lynes.''Russell Lynes, 80, an Editor and Arbiter of Taste'' by Richard Severo, September 16, 1991, New York Timesbr>onlineretrieved February 18, 2008 obituary His older brother was George Platt Lynes (1907-1955), the photographer. In 1932, he graduated from Yale University. Career Lynes started as a clerk at Harper & Brothers, the publishing house, from 1932 to 1936 and was director of publications at Vassar in 1936 and 1937. He then took a job at the Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, where he was assistant principal from 1937 to 1940, then principal until 1944. He then joined Harper's Magazine as an assistant editor and became managing editor in 1947, a position he would hol ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Death Of The Moth
This is a bibliography of works by the English novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf. Novels *''The Voyage Out'' (1915) *'' Night and Day'' (1919) *''Jacob's Room'' (1922) *'' Mrs Dalloway'' (1925) *'' To the Lighthouse'' (1927) *'' Orlando: A Biography'' (1928) *''The Waves'' (1931) *''The Years'' (1937) *''Between the Acts'' (1941) Short fiction Short stories *"Phyllis and Rosamond" *"The Mysterious Case of Miss V." *"The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn" *"A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus" *"Memoirs of a Novelist" *"The Mark on the Wall" (1917) *"Kew Gardens" (1919) *"The Evening Party" *"Solid Objects" (1920) *"Sympathy" (1921) *"An Unwritten Novel" (1920) *"A Haunted House" (1921) *"A Society" (1921) *"Monday or Tuesday" (1921) *" The String Quartet" (1921) *"Blue & Green" (1921) *"A Woman's College from Outside" (1926) *"In the Orchard" (1923) *"Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street" (1923) *"Nurse Lugton's Curtain" *"The Widow and the Parrot: A True Story" (1985) *" The New Dress" (19 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Low Culture
In sociology, the term Low culture identifies the forms of popular culture that have mass appeal, which is in contrast to High culture, which has a limited appeal to a smaller proportion of the populace. Culture theory proposes that both high culture and low culture are subcultures within a society, because each type of popular culture is mass produced by the culture industry, for every social class. Standards and definitions In ''Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste'' (1958), Herbert J. Gans defines and identifies ''Low culture'': Culture as social class Each social class possess their own types of high-culture and of low-culture, the definition and content of which are determined by the socio-economic and educational particulars, the ''habitus'' of the people who compose a given social class. Therefore, what is ''high culture'' and what is ''low culture'' has specific meanings and usages collectively determined by the members of a s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Modernism
Modernism is both a philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new forms of art, philosophy, and social organization which reflected the newly emerging industrial world, including features such as urbanization, architecture, new technologies, and war. Artists attempted to depart from traditional forms of art, which they considered outdated or obsolete. The poet Ezra Pound's 1934 injunction to "Make it New" was the touchstone of the movement's approach. Modernist innovations included abstract art, the stream-of-consciousness novel, montage cinema, atonal and twelve-tone music, divisionist painting and modern architecture. Modernism explicitly rejected the ideology of realism and made use of the works of the past by the employment of reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision and parody. Modernism also rej ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
High Culture
High culture is a subculture that emphasizes and encompasses the cultural objects of aesthetic value, which a society collectively esteem as exemplary art, and the intellectual works of philosophy, history, art, and literature that a society consider representative of their culture. Definition In popular usage, the term ''high culture'' identifies the culture of an upper class (an aristocracy) or of a status class (the intelligentsia); and also identifies a society’s common repository of broad-range knowledge and tradition (e.g. folk culture) that transcends the social-class system of the society. Sociologically, the term ''high culture'' is contrasted with the term '' low culture'', the forms of popular culture characteristic of the less-educated social classes, such as the barbarians, the Philistines, and '' hoi polloi'' (the masses). Concept In European history, high culture was understood as a cultural concept common to the humanities, until the mid-19th century, when ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reputation
The reputation of a social entity (a person, a social group, an organization, or a place) is an opinion about that entity typically as a result of social evaluation on a set of criteria, such as behavior or performance. Reputation is a ubiquitous, spontaneous, and highly efficient mechanism of social control. It is a subject of study in social, management, and technological sciences. Its influence ranges from competitive settings, like markets, to cooperative ones, like firms, organizations, institutions and communities. Furthermore, reputation acts on different levels of agency, individual and supra-individual. At the supra-individual level, it concerns groups, communities, collectives and abstract social entities (such as firms, corporations, organizations, countries, cultures and even civilizations). It affects phenomena of different scales, from everyday life to relationships between nations. Reputation is a fundamental instrument of social order, based upon distributed, spon ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Our Town
''Our Town'' is a 1938 Metatheatre, metatheatrical Three act structure, three-act play by American playwright Thornton Wilder which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play tells the story of the fictional American small town of Grover's Corners between 1901 and 1913 through the everyday lives of its citizens. Throughout, Wilder uses metatheatrical devices, setting the play in the actual theatre where it is being performed. The main character is the stage manager of the theatre who directly addresses the audience, brings in guest lecturers, fields questions from the audience, and fills in playing some of the roles. The play is performed without a set on a mostly bare stage. With a few exceptions, the actors mime actions without the use of props. ''Our Town'' was first performed at McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1938. It later went on to success on Broadway (theatre), Broadway and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Described by Edward Albee as "the greatest A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Old Man And The Sea
''The Old Man and the Sea'' is a novella written by the American author Ernest Hemingway in 1951 in Cayo Blanco (Cuba), and published in 1952. It was the last major work of fiction written by Hemingway that was published during his lifetime. One of his most famous works, it tells the story of Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Cuba. In 1953, ''The Old Man and the Sea'' was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and it was cited by the Nobel Committee as contributing to their awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Hemingway in 1954. Plot summary Santiago is an aging, experienced fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without catching a fish. He is now seen as "''salao''" (colloquial pronunciation of "''salado''", which means salty), the worst form of unlucky. Manolin, a young man whom Santiago has trained since childhood, has been forced by his parents to work on a luckier boat. Manolin re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Collegiate Gothic In North America
Collegiate Gothic is an architectural style subgenre of Gothic Revival architecture, popular in the late-19th and early-20th centuries for college and high school buildings in the United States and Canada, and to a certain extent Europe. A form of historicist architecture, it took its inspiration from English Tudor and Gothic buildings. It has returned in the 21st century in the form of prominent new buildings at schools and universities including Princeton and Yale. Ralph Adams Cram, arguably the leading Gothic Revival architect and theoretician in the early 20th century, wrote about the appeal of the Gothic for educational facilities in his book ''Gothic Quest:'' "Through architecture and its allied arts we have the power to bend men and sway them as few have who depended on the spoken word. It is for us, as part of our duty as our highest privilege to act...for spreading what is true." History Beginnings Gothic Revival architecture was used for American college buil ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Book-of-the-Month Club
Book of the Month (founded 1926) is a United States subscription-based e-commerce service that offers a selection of five to seven new hardcover books each month to its members. Books are selected and endorsed by a panel of judges, and members choose which book they would like to receive, similar to how the club originally operated when it began in 1926. Members can also discuss the books with fellow members in an online forum. In late 2015, in concert with the club's 90th year, the club announced a relaunch into its current iteration. Within two years, the club had grown its membership to more than 100,000 members, primarily millennial women, and the club's presence on social media grew to over 1.2 million instagram followers. Approximately 75% of the club's titles are by up-and-coming authors, and 80% of titles are fiction. The club has also worked with a series of celebrity guest judges who bring broader awareness to new titles, and continues producing its own versions of book ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Oprah's Book Club
Oprah's Book Club was a book discussion club segment of the American talk show ''The Oprah Winfrey Show'', highlighting books chosen by host Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey started the book club in 1996, selecting a new book, usually a novel, for viewers to read and discuss each month.Bob Minzesheimer"How the 'Oprah Effect' changed publishing" ''USA Today'', May 23, 2011.Matthew Flamm"Publishers say farewell to Oprah Book Club boon" ''Crain's New York Business'', May 20, 2011. In total, the club recommended 70 books during its 15 years. Due to the book club's widespread popularity, many obscure titles have become very popular bestsellers, increasing sales in some cases by as many as several million copies. Al Greco, a Fordham University marketing professor, estimated the total sales of the 70 "Oprah editions" at over 55 million copies. The club has seen several literary controversies, such as Jonathan Franzen's public dissatisfaction with his novel, ''The Corrections'', having been ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
