Negotiating the Brows: Value, Identity, and the Formation of Middlebrow Culture
| dc.contributor.advisor | Whalan, Mark | |
| dc.contributor.author | Tanner, Rachel | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2020-09-24T17:18:48Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2020-09-24T17:18:48Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2020-09-24 | |
| dc.description.abstract | The middlebrow has always caused problems. When the term entered the popular lexicon during the 1920s and ‘30s, critics often used it as an epithet to lampoon middle-class readers who were more interested in accumulating social status than appreciating aesthetic value. The guardians of elite culture—whether genteel or avant-garde—considered this dilettantist subset of the middle class a threat to their cultural authority and adopted the newly-coined term to create distinctions between second-rate taste and their own. As a result, the middlebrow often found itself reduced to a synonym for standardized, mediocre middle-class taste. The essays in this dissertation project, by contrast, posit the middlebrow as an affirmative category. The project weaves together critical voices, primarily found in magazines of the first half of the twentieth century, that variously created, theorized, debated, and attempted to contain cultural “middleness.” The result is a century-long conversation about what the middlebrow looks like and who gets to decide, throughout which anxieties over class and authority are always close at hand. Each essay in this project addresses the logical and rhetorical structures at play in configuring middlebrow culture, both by critics who identify with the category and those who identify against it. And each essay demonstrates how those structures have the power to shift the framing of cultural value. The ways in which critics describe or deploy “middleness,” therefore, shapes the debate about which creative works, genres, or forms—and, by extension, their audiences—are really truly legitimate. The essays also each wrestle with contemporary critics’ tendency to link middlebrow culture to the middle class, limiting its affirmative potential by grounding their analyses in theories that reinforce, rather than upset, hierarchical configurations of culture. Ultimately, this project argues throughout for an understanding of middlebrow as a rhetorical position in debates about cultural value, one capable of embracing multiple value perspectives at once and negotiating the various ways that values get assigned to forms of cultural production and consumption. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1794/25654 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | |
| dc.publisher | University of Oregon | |
| dc.rights | All Rights Reserved. | |
| dc.subject | Edward Bok | en_US |
| dc.subject | George Horace Lorimer | en_US |
| dc.subject | Kenneth Burke | en_US |
| dc.subject | Middlebrow | en_US |
| dc.subject | Periodical Studies | en_US |
| dc.subject | Vanity Fair | en_US |
| dc.title | Negotiating the Brows: Value, Identity, and the Formation of Middlebrow Culture | |
| dc.type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | Department of English | |
| thesis.degree.grantor | University of Oregon | |
| thesis.degree.level | doctoral | |
| thesis.degree.name | Ph.D. |
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