Criticism of Popular Culture
ROGER SHATIUCK: This last section is on the cntICIsm of popular
culture, and there are three participants. The first speaker is Richard
Gilman who is a professor of drama at Yale, and the work for which
he is widely known is
The Making of Modern Drama.
And he has
recently published a book called
Decadence.
He is a man of the
theater, a working critic, and he recently received the Morton
Dauwen Zabel Award in criticism, awarded by the American
Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese is
a professor at Rochester and she is at work on two books-one of
them on fashion, the other on Marxism and history (in collaboration
with her husband). The last speaker is Keith Botsford, who is the
author of four novels, and is the motor racing correspondent for the
Sunday
Times.
Richard Gilman
I can understand how for the purposes of this conference my
subject should have been given to me as though it were an actuality, or
at least a real possibility, as though a substantial body of criticism of
what some people right! y or not choose to call popular culture already
exists or is something we have only to turn our minds to in order to
create. But for a number of reasons I think the matter is a good deal
more complicated than that, as well as being extremely treacherous.
The difficulties begin, it seems to me, with the question, what in fact is
popular culture and go on to the related question of how-whatever we
decide it is-does or can criticism, as we have known it or can imagine
it, deal with that?
In
the first place, I doubt whether many of us are comfortable with
the term
popular culture,
which for several reasons I think inaccurate
and misleading, as well as condescending. The term
mass culture
is
obnoxious in another way, with its denotation of something gray,
undifferentiated and morose. Moreover, on the tongues of most of those
who like to use it the designation implies a lofty superiority, a distaste
