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Author: Peter Swirski
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349951684
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
This book examines nobrow, a cultural formation that intertwines art and entertainment into an identifiable creative force. In our eclectic and culturally turbocharged world, the binary of highbrow vs. lowbrow is incapable of doing justice to the complexity and artistry of cultural production. Until now, the historical power, aesthetic complexity, and social significance of nobrow “artertainment” have escaped analysis. This book rectifies this oversight. Smart, funny, and iconoclastic, it scrutinizes the many faces of nobrow, throwing surprising light on the hazards and rewards of traffic between high entertainment and genre art.
Author: Peter Swirski
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349951684
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book examines nobrow, a cultural formation that intertwines art and entertainment into an identifiable creative force. In our eclectic and culturally turbocharged world, the binary of highbrow vs. lowbrow is incapable of doing justice to the complexity and artistry of cultural production. Until now, the historical power, aesthetic complexity, and social significance of nobrow “artertainment” have escaped analysis. This book rectifies this oversight. Smart, funny, and iconoclastic, it scrutinizes the many faces of nobrow, throwing surprising light on the hazards and rewards of traffic between high entertainment and genre art.
Author: David Savran
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472116924
Category : Jazz
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
The culture clash that permanently changed American theater
Author: Lawrence W. LEVINE
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674040139
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
In this unusually wide-ranging study, spanning more than a century and covering such diverse forms of expressive culture as Shakespeare, Central Park, symphonies, jazz, art museums, the Marx Brothers, opera, and vaudeville, a leading cultural historian demonstrates how variable and dynamic cultural boundaries have been and how fragile and recent the cultural categories we have learned to accept as natural and eternal are. For most of the nineteenth century, a wide variety of expressive forms—Shakespearean drama, opera, orchestral music, painting and sculpture, as well as the writings of such authors as Dickens and Longfellow—enjoyed both high cultural status and mass popularity. In the nineteenth century Americans (in addition to whatever specific ethnic, class, and regional cultures they were part of) shared a public culture less hierarchically organized, less fragmented into relatively rigid adjectival groupings than their descendants were to experience. By the twentieth century this cultural eclecticism and openness became increasingly rare. Cultural space was more sharply defined and less flexible than it had been. The theater, once a microcosm of America—housing both the entire spectrum of the population and the complete range of entertainment from tragedy to farce, juggling to ballet, opera to minstrelsy—now fragmented into discrete spaces catering to distinct audiences and separate genres of expressive culture. The same transition occurred in concert halls, opera houses, and museums. A growing chasm between “serious” and “popular,” between “high” and “low” culture came to dominate America’s expressive arts. “If there is a tragedy in this development,” Lawrence Levine comments, “it is not only that millions of Americans were now separated from exposure to such creators as Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Verdi, whom they had enjoyed in various formats for much of the nineteenth century, but also that the rigid cultural categories, once they were in place, made it so difficult for so long for so many to understand the value and importance of the popular art forms that were all around them. Too many of those who considered themselves educated and cultured lost for a significant period—and many have still not regained—their ability to discriminate independently, to sort things out for themselves and understand that simply because a form of expressive culture was widely accessible and highly popular it was not therefore necessarily devoid of any redeeming value or artistic merit.” In this innovative historical exploration, Levine not only traces the emergence of such familiar categories as highbrow and lowbrow at the turn of the century, but helps us to understand more clearly both the process of cultural change and the nature of culture in American society.
Author: The Editors of New York Magazine
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501166859
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 432
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Book Description
New York, the city. New York, the magazine. A celebration. The great story of New York City in the past half-century has been its near collapse and miraculous rebirth. A battered town left for dead, one that almost a million people abandoned and where those who remained had to live behind triple deadbolt locks, was reinvigorated by the twinned energies of starving artists and financial white knights. Over the next generation, the city was utterly transformed. It again became the capital of wealth and innovation, an engine of cultural vibrancy, a magnet for immigrants, and a city of endless possibility. It was the place to be—if you could afford it. Since its founding in 1968, New York Magazine has told the story of that city’s constant morphing, week after week. Covering culture high and low, the drama and scandal of politics and finance, through jubilant moments and immense tragedies, the magazine has hit readers where they live, with a sensibility as fast and funny and urbane as New York itself. From its early days publishing writers like Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, and Gloria Steinem to its modern incarnation as a laboratory of inventive magazine-making, New York has had an extraordinary knack for catching the Zeitgeist and getting it on the page. It was among the originators of the New Journalism, publishing legendary stories whose authors infiltrated a Black Panther party in Leonard Bernstein’s apartment, introduced us to the mother-daughter hermits living in the dilapidated estate known as Grey Gardens, launched Ms. Magazine, branded a group of up-and-coming teen stars “the Brat Pack,” and effectively ended the career of Roger Ailes. Again and again, it introduced new words into the conversation—from “foodie” to “normcore”—and spotted fresh talent before just about anyone. Along the way, those writers and their colleagues revealed what was most interesting at the forward edge of American culture—from the old Brooklyn of Saturday Night Fever to the new Brooklyn of artisanal food trucks, from the Wall Street crashes to the hedge-fund spoils, from The Godfather to Girls—in ways that were knowing, witty, sometimes weird, occasionally vulgar, and often unforgettable. On “The Approval Matrix,” the magazine’s beloved back-page feature, New York itself would fall at the crossroads of highbrow and lowbrow, and more brilliant than despicable. (Most of the time.) Marking the magazine’s fiftieth birthday, Highbrow, Lowbrow, Brilliant, Despicable: 50 Years of New York draws from all that coverage to present an enormous, sweeping, idiosyncratic picture of a half-century at the center of the world. Through stories and images of power and money, movies and food, crises and family life, it constitutes an unparalleled history of that city’s transformation, and of a New York City institution as well. It is packed with behind-the-scenes stories from New York’s writers, editors, designers, and journalistic subjects—and frequently overflows its own pages onto spectacular foldouts. It’s a big book for a big town.
Author: Rob Kroes
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
Verzameling essays die een beeld geven van de wijze waarop de 20e eeuwse Amerikaanse intelligentsia tegen hun eigen (massa)cultuur aankijkt
Author: John Cline
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810876558
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 364
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Book Description
This collection of essays represents key contributions to 'transgression cinema:' overlooked, forgotten, or under-analyzed movies that walk the fine line between 'arthouse' and 'grindhouse' film.
Author: Peter Swirski
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773573240
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
Swirski begins with a series of groundbreaking questions about the nature of popular fiction, vindicating it as an artform that expresses and reflects the aesthetic and social values of its readers. He follows his insightful introduction to the socio-aesthetics of genre literature with a synthesis of the century long debate on the merits of popular fiction and a study of genre informed by analytic aesthetics and game theory. Swirski then turns to three "nobrow" novels that have been largely ignored by critics. Examining the aesthetics of "artertainment" in Karel Capek's War with the Newts, Raymond Chandler's Playback, and Stanislaw Lem's Chain of Chance, crossover tours de force, From Lowbrow to Nobrow throws new light on the hazards and rewards of nobrow traffic between popular forms and highbrow aesthetics.
Author: Kate Guthrie
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197523951
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 633
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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Middlebrow takes a fresh look at the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music. Offering an alternative to the traditional focus on either highbrow modernism on the one hand or lowbrow popular music on the other, its novel view centers on the wealth of previously overlooked products and practices that bridged the space between these cultural extremes. While seminal attempts to recover middlebrow culture came from literary critics and historians, middlebrow studies is now a burgeoning field within musicology. As the first essay collection on this topic, this handbook has two aims: first, it seeks to explore the middlebrow as a historical phenomenon, excavating the kinds of critical writings, marketing practices, and compositional styles with which it was associated. By reanimating a range of musical practices and products--from symphonic concerts to Broadway musicals, opera criticism to rock journalism, and modern jazz to pop-rock--the contributors investigate how artists, critics, and audiences breached the divide from both above and below. In the process, the handbook chapters push the boundaries of middlebrow studies and demonstrate the category's relevance outside of the mid-twentieth-century Anglophone world by delving into the nineteenth century, interrogating the present day, and looking to Germany, Russia, and beyond. The handbook's second aim is to complicate the disciplinary divisions that have flowed from the entrenched oppositions between high and low genres. Breaking new ground by bringing together scholars of classical and popular music, these chapters trace common middlebrow themes across traditional disciplinary boundaries. Across this broad vista, contributors account for the kinds of syntheses, overlaps, and juxtapositions that made the cultural middle such a richly textured and endlessly contested terrain.
Author: Peter Swirski
Publisher: Vernon Press
ISBN: 1622735803
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 255
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Book Description
Artertainment is more than a novel aesthetic term reflecting the fact that art and entertainment have cross-pollinated each other throughout history. It is a creative strategy that purposely intertwines highbrow and lowbrow aesthetics in the name of reaching the connoisseurs and the masses. The Art of Artertainment sets out to unravel the jumble of aesthetic faultlines and prejudices found wherever we find artistic crossovers—which is to say, everywhere. Revisionist, iconoclastic, and artertaining in its own right, it provides a new framework for the analysis of American nobrow culture from the Colonial times to the digitally turbocharged present.
Author: Antonio Sanna
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030047989
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303
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Book Description
This edited collection offers an interdisciplinary study of Twin Peaks: The Return, the third season of a TV program that has attracted the attention (and appreciation) of spectators, fans, and critics for over two decades. The book takes readers into several distinct areas and addresses the different approaches and the range of topics invited by the multidimensionality of the subject itself: the philosophical, the artistic, the socio-cultural, and the personal. The eighteen chapters constituting the volume are academic in their approach to the subject and in their methodology, whether they apply a historical, psychoanalytical, film studies, or gender studies perspective to the text under examination. The variety and range of perspectives in these aforementioned chapters reflect the belief that a study of the full complexity of Twin Peaks: The Return, as well as a timely assessment of the critical importance of the program, requires both an interdisciplinary perspective and the fusion of different intellectual approaches across genres. The chapters demonstrate a collective awareness of the TV series as a fundamental milestone in contemporary culture.
