Consuming Pleasures by Horowitz Daniel;

Author:Horowitz, Daniel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2012-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Popular Arts (1964)

The Popular Arts appeared at a time when there was remarkably little focused scholarship on popular culture, even in America, where Riesman was among the few respected intellectuals to take it seriously rather than simply denounce it. Hall and Whannel ranged widely in their discussion of popular culture, focusing on newspapers, advertising, romance novels, detective stories, radio, television, documentaries, and musical genres including rock and roll, jazz, and the blues. They were determined to reject the approach to popular culture that focused on its effects and instead consider its content critically. They relied on a number of writers, their own colleagues in the New Left, as well as Williams, Hoggart, McLuhan, Eliot, and the Leavises. Like F. R. Leavis, they extended the social reach of education in textual analysis and used literary criticism to analyze a wide range of texts. Especially in Education and the University, they asserted, he had “argued convincingly that criticism, with its attention to a whole response and its concern for the life of the mind and the tone of civilization, is a creative activity in the true sense,” a series of commitments they wished to apply and extend. As F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson had done in Culture and Environment, Hall and Whannel offered school teachers practical guidance on the teaching of popular culture, providing as they did material for instruction in classes. At the end of the book Hall and Whannel recommended projects for teachers to follow, as well as long lists of books to read, records to listen to, film and television to watch, and organizations to call on.54

They wrote with an awareness of the tension between teachers who wanted to persuade their students to oppose popular culture and students who embraced an unthinking indulgence. In the book’s opening paragraph they remarked that like other teachers in secondary modern schools they were “acutely aware of the conflict between the norms and expectations of formal education and the complexities of the real world which children and young people inhabit.” Some teachers, they claimed later in the book, saw “a uniform mass culture standing in bleak hostility to the traditional virtues,” while others wanted to use the study of popular culture as a teaser to elevate taste of students who loved living in the worlds of popular culture. In response, most teachers treated mass media either as entertainment or as the object of moral censure. Others, more sympathetic to their students, saw classes on popular music or jazz as “stepping- stones in a hierarchy of taste” eventually leading students to appreciate Shakespeare or Mozart.55

For Hall and Whannel discrimination was the central activity of the critic. Quoting McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride, they underscored the importance of the “activity of perception and judgment” when examining “a great range of particular acts and experiences.” Like Q. D. Leavis and Hoggart, the authors of The Popular Arts were interested in the dynamics of the relationships between producers and consumers of culture, as well as between high, literary culture and popular culture.

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