Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain (New York Review Books Classics) - Softcover

Macdonald, Dwight

Softcover

ISBN 10: 159017447X ISBN 13: 9781590174470

Verlag: NYRB Classics, 2011

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Paperback of the week: A savage indictment of the middlebrow culture he saw rising around him - mass culture masquerading as high art, promoted by money-hungry businessmen and consumed by the public unawares.

(Observer)

Dwight Macdonald was a magnificent destroyer of the vitues claimed for what he called Midcult, the rubbish of mas culture given a fig leaf of respectability by critics.

Reseña del editor

A New York Review Books Original. Political radical, trenchant essayist, and impresario of the New York Intellectuals, Dwight MacDonald was one of the towering figures of twentieth century American letters. In Masscult & Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain, first published in 1962, MacDonald turned his formidable critical attention to what he saw as a new, and potentially catastrophic, development in the history of Western civilization: the influence-by turns distorting, destructive, and inadvertently ridiculous-of mass culture on high culture. In essays that range in subject matter from Ernest Hemingway, James Agee, and Tom Wolfe to Webster's Dictionary and the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, MacDonald is shrewd, passionate, and bracingly alive to the complexities of his subject, which he defines as being "not the dead sea of masscult but rather the life of the tide line where higher and lower organisms compete for survival."

Prescient, profound, at once scathing and hilarious in their indictment of the middlebrow sensibility, the pieces in this volume constitute an indispensable work of criticism born out of and informed by the conviction that "a people that loses contact with its past becomes culturally psychotic."

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: NYRB Classics
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• ISBN 10: 159017447X
• ISBN 13: 9781590174470
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Herausgeber: Summers John