4/25/2023 0 Comments Highbrow personLynes then distinguished the sub-levels of the intellectual brow and divided the middlebrow into the upper-middlebrow and the lower-middlebrow. Lyne specifically criticised Woolf's claim that the consumer products used by a person identified his and her socio-cultural stratum in society in the letter, Woolf identified consumer products that, in her opinion, identified the user as a middlebrow person. Quoting Woolf and other highbrows, such as art critic Clement Greenberg, Lynes said that the subtle distinctions that Woolf found significant among the levels of brows were just a means of upholding an artificial cultural superiority over the popular culture consumed by the middlebrow and the lowbrow strata of society. In the essay “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow” (1949), Russell Lynes satirized Virginia Woolf's highbrow scorn for middlebrow people voiced in her editorial letter. Instead of such social and intellectual freedom, the middlebrows are betwixt and between, people whom Woolf characterises as "in pursuit of no single object, neither Art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige." The middlebrow value system rewards quick gains through books already designated as 'Classic literature' and as 'Great literature', but never of their own choosing, because "to buy living art requires living taste." The critic Woolf concludes that the middlebrow class are culturally meretricious - a human condition less demanding than personal authenticity. ![]() ![]() Likewise, a lowbrow person is devoted to a singular interest, a person "of thoroughbred vitality who rides his body in pursuit of a living at a gallop across life" and, therefore, the lowbrow are equally worthy of reverence, as they, too, are living for what they intrinsically know as valuable. Rather than select and read books for their intrinsic cultural value, middlebrow people select and read books they are told are the best books to read: "We highbrows read what we like and do what we like and praise what we like." Middlebrows are concerned with appearances, with how their social activities makes them appear to the community, unlike the highbrows, the avant-garde men and women who act according to their commitment to the beauty and forms of art, and to values and integrity. Īs a social critic, Woolf criticizes middlebrows as petty purveyors of highbrow culture for their own shallow benefit. The letter-to-the-editor was posthumously published in the essay collection The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942). In 1941, Virginia Woolf derided the middlebrow mentality in an un-posted letter to the editor of the New Statesman & Nation, concerning a radio broadcast that attacked the highbrows of British society as people intellectually detached from everyday life. In contrast, the philosophy of postmodernism readily perceives the cultural advantages of the perspective of the middlebrow person who is aware of and likes high culture, but effectively balances the aesthetic demands of high art with the cultural demands daily life in the world. ![]() Culturally, the middlebrow sensibility appears as a forced and ineffective attempt at cultural and intellectual achievement by way of popular literature that emphasises emotional and sentimental connections, rather than intellectualism and an appreciation of literary innovation. In the mid 20th century, the term middlebrow became a pejorative usage in the modernist cultural criticism written by Dwight Macdonald, Virginia Woolf, and Russell Lynes, which pejorative usage placed popular culture at the margin of mainstream culture in favour of high culture. First used in the British satire magazine Punch in 1925, the term middlebrow is the intellectual, intermediary brow between the highbrow and the lowbrow forms of culture the terms highbrow and lowbrow are borrowed from the pseudoscience of phrenology. The term middlebrow describes middlebrow art, which is easily accessible art, usually popular literature, and middlebrow people who use the arts to acquire the social capital of “culture and class” and thus a good reputation.
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