Patterns for America by Hegeman Susan;

Author:Hegeman, Susan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Middle West, Middlebrow, Middletown

Out of this moment’s highly politicized cultural landscape, an interesting convergence of the two competing narratives of cultural difference began to emerge. In effect, the class-based version of difference would be lined up with the regionalist account in such a way that one region, the Midwest, became synonymous with the middle (bourgeois) stratum of cultural taste. As we shall see, this convergence had a certain political power on both sides of the cultural debate, and from both sides of the geographic divide. While elites in the urban centers were thus justified in maintaining their traditional disdain of the provincial (nicely summed up by New Yorker editor Harold Ross’s slogan for his sophisticated urban magazine: “Not for the old lady in Dubuque”), Midwesterners too found a kind of comfort in the association. Turning the negative stereotype into a more positive sign of identity, some would embrace the “middlebrow” label as a sign of its antielitist American authenticity. Like their heir, Garrison Keillor, regionalist cultural boosters of the Midwest would murmur back a defensive, “We like it here.” Before addressing the Midwestern response to this interesting convergence between images of the Midwest and the idea of middlebrow taste, the link must first be explained in terms of both historical conditions and the cultural imagination of the period.

Pierre Bourdieu reminds us that “highbrow” and “middlebrow” tastes are both indigenous to the dominant classes, but that they are derived from different portions of the bourgeoisie. The first (“legitimate” culture) belongs to people secure in both their economic and cultural capital, while the other (culture moyenne) belongs to members of a still-ascending fraction of the middle class, who are, hence, insecurely reverential of a high culture to which they still have limited access. As with the distinctions between high and low culture generally, the difference between highbrow and middlebrow tastes is a question of social distance from the centers of cultural production. Thus, to Bourdieu, the quintessential products of middlebrow taste are “cultural intermediaries” such as film adaptations of works of “legitimate” literature and symphonic “pops” concerts, which fill the gap, as it were, in the social-cultural hierarchy.23

In the 1930s United States, such cultural intermediaries abounded, reflecting the social aspirations of many middle-class Americans. But their ubiquity also reflects the uneven national distribution of cultural resources. As with the Sears catalogue for the prairie farmer, it is easy to see how much more important cultural outlets such as the Book-of-the-Month Club, the Chautauqua and Lyceum lecture circuits, or the CBS Radio Orchestra would have been to cultural consumers living outside of major cities.24 And even among cities, there were few that could support an active community of artists whose livelihoods did not depend on providing such “cultural intermediaries.” Though Chicago had been an important market hub since before the turn of the century, and in the 1920s had a thriving arts scene, even the artists of the “Chicago Renaissance” eventually made their bid for national prominence in New York, the location of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.