Against The American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"For about two centuries Western culture has in fact been two cultures: the traditional kind—let us call it High Culture—that is chronicled in the textbooks, and a novel kind that is manufactured for the market. This latter may be called Mass Culture, or better Masscult, since it really isn’t culture at all."--"Masscult and Midcult" (1960) by Dwight Macdonald |
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Against The American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture (1962) is a book by Dwight Macdonald.
"Against the American Grain" is a collection of essays and critical reviews that Macdonald wrote between 1952 and 1962.
Edited by John Summers ; introduction by Louis Menand.
Blurb
A New York Review Books Original An uncompromising contrarian, a passionate polemicist, a man of quick wit and wide learning, an anarchist, a pacifist, and a virtuoso of the slashing phrase, Dwight Macdonald was an indefatigable and indomitable critic of America's susceptibility to well-meaning cultural fakery: all those estimable, eminent, prizewinning works of art that are said to be good and good for you and are not. He dubbed this phenomenon "Midcult" and he attacked it not only on aesthetic but on political grounds. Midcult rendered people complacent and compliant, secure in their common stupidity but neither happy nor free. This new selection of Macdonald's finest essays, assembled by John Summers, the editor of The Baffler, reintroduces a remarkable American critic and writer. In the era of smart, sexy, and everything indie, Macdonald remains as pertinent and challenging as ever.
Criticism
In The New Republic essay "The Browbeater" on 23 November 2011, Franklin Foer accused Macdonald of being a hatchet-man for high culture, going on to say that in his Masscult and Midcult: Against The American Grain (2011), a new edition of Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture (1962), Macdonald's cultural criticism "culminated in a plea for highbrows to escape from the mass culture" that dominates the mainstream of American society. Macdonald, Foer suggests, would welcome a time when "highbrows would flee to their own hermetic little world, where they could produce art for one another, while resolutely ignoring the masses."
Table of contents
Masscult and Midcult --
James Agee --
Ernest Hemingway --
By Cozzens possessed --
The book of the millennium club --
Updating the Bible --
The string untuned --
The triumph of the fact --
Parajournalism, or, Tom Wolfe and his magic writing machine --
Norman Cousins's flat world.
