Abstract
Chapter 2, Arthur Berger’s “Pop Culture and Nobrow Culture-From Li’l Abner to Discourse Theory and Back: A Culture Critic’s Odyssey” offers a personal chronicle of the birth and growth of popular culture studies. It all comes to a head in the early 1960s with the über-popular comic strip L’il Abner and an unwary graduate student, who set out to pen a thesis on it-the first American study on comic books. From the institutional tiffs and personal fallings-out to tales of piqued pride and full-scale prejudice, we get a front-row seat overview of the decades of scholarly controversies over Main Street’s assault on Art Lane.
A magazine hires a journalism professor to help improve its circulation. After reading a number of copies of the magazine, the professor says to the editor, “I suggest you raise the intellectual level of the magazine.” The editor replies, “We tried that and it led to a loss of many readers.” “Well, then,” said the professor, “why not lower the intellectual level of the magazine.” “Impossible!” replies the editor.
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Notes
- 1.
McLuhan, 1951, p. v.
- 2.
Theall, 2001, pp. 4–5.
- 3.
Rosenberg and White, 1957, p. 7.
- 4.
Rosenberg and White, 1957, p. 17.
- 5.
Jowett, 1992, p. 2.
- 6.
Malinowski, 1922, p. xvi.
- 7.
Berger, 1973, pp. 8–9.
- 8.
Berger, 1974.
- 9.
Barthes, 1972, p. 9.
- 10.
MacCannell, 1976, p. 1.
- 11.
Cameron and Panovic, 2014, p. 97.
- 12.
Lyotard, 1993, p. 8.
- 13.
Jameson, 1991, p. 3.
- 14.
Saussure, 1966, p. 117; following quote p. 120.
- 15.
Culler, 1986, p. 61.
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Berger, A.A. (2017). Pop Culture and Nobrow Culture. In: Swirski, P., Vanhanen, T. (eds) When Highbrow Meets Lowbrow. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95168-0_2
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