Middlebrow Cultures
University of Strathclyde, Glasgow
Tuesday 14th – Wednesday 15th July 2009
Plenary speakers:
'Making the Middlebrow Emerging Literacies and the Material Culture of Print Culture', Professor Ann Ardis, University of Delaware
and
'Testing the Limits of the Middlebrow: the Holocaust for the Masses', Professor Phyllis Lassner, Northwestern University
The study of middlebrow culture matters because it illuminates a set of tastes, institutions and social practices associated primarily with the aspirational middle class in the early to mid-twentieth century, and because it helps us understand the relationship between elite, popular and 'intermediate' cultural production. It matters especially now because the emergence of middlebrow cultural products in the decades following the First World War was, primarily, a result of technical innovations in printing, distribution, recording, and broadcasting. This relates directly to trends in our own time, since the internet has not only resulted in a vast renaissance of textual production, but has also generated new internationalised audiences and interpretive communities which echo the middlebrow cultural formations of the early twentieth century. Examples include electronic book clubs, new bohemian web magazines, and diaries and blogs which recall the Mass Observation project.
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