Virginia Woolf loathed the concept of the middlebrow—“If any human being, man, woman, dog, cat or half-crushed worm dares call me middlebrow … I will take my pen and stab him dead”—but she should’ve gone easier on it.
“Middlebrow is a name you would never call yourself, but rather a semantic shoe that belongs on someone else’s foot. It is also, however, a workable synonym, in the sphere of art and culture, for democracy.”
mid·dle·brow
derogatory
adjective
- (of art or literature or a system of thought) demanding or involving only a moderate degree of intellectual application, typically as a result of not deviating from convention
"middlebrow fiction"
noun
- a person who is capable of or enjoys only a moderate degree of intellectual effort.
For our purposes, it’s important to note two key figures in the middlebrow debate: Virginia Woolf, who denounced middlebrows for missing the intrinsic value of art and using it for their own whimsy (I think of it as using art to decorate one’s life rather than viewing art as a way of life); and Russell Lynes, an editor at Harper’s at the time Woolf was writing, who attacked her for wanting a world in which all art “belonged” to highbrows, and who praised the aspirational qualities of middlebrows. Their disagreement was somewhat rhetorical and demonstrates the slipperiness of terms like “highbrow” and “middlebrow”: Woolf’s own reviews have often been categorized as middlebrow because she wrote about books that were not “high” art for middlebrow publications, using accessible language. And this is what popped into my mind at the event last week when Zadie Smith lauded Woolf for reviewing whatever she wanted, however she wanted, without being overly concerned about what her snooty colleagues might think; and in making the distinction she did between “reviewer” and “critic.”
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/on-middlebrow
Since Woolf and Lynes there have been decades of contemplation about the term “middlebrow” and how it relates to mass culture (most notably by Dwight MacDonald in his 1960 “Masscult and Midcult”), and I brought the idea up in yesterday’s post because the Internet is forcing us to rethink (again) what “middlebrow” means: in an era when the highest is as accessible as the lowest—accessible in the sense that both are only a click away (there is so much more to be said about this than I can say here!)—we actually have to think anew about how to walk that middle line. I wrote that Zadie Smith is one of the current re-inventors of the (middlebrow) book review because she combines a very high level of critical intelligence with accessible language, an abbreviated format, and a strong personality.
The following is a brief listing of books written by Virginia Woolf.
http://www.uah.edu/woolf/works.htmMrs. Dalloway
(see also The Hours, a new movie based on Michael Cunningham's adaptation of Mrs. Dalloway)
Moments of Being
Orlando
A Room of One's Own
To the Lighthouse
The Voyage Out
The Wave
Stephanie Doty
Women’s Issues Matter
August 5, 2014
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
